


A Seed of Hope

by Queerapika



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Body Horror, HxHBB17, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Minor Character Death, gore tw, nature sprites, the woods are alive with the sound of wishes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-06 02:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11026281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queerapika/pseuds/Queerapika
Summary: Kurapika has lived his life protecting himself from the dark things that roam at night when the wood's magic wanes. They are hungry. They have a taste for him. All he wants is some peace and quiet – and then Leorio shows up on his doorstep. Naked. Unconscious. Tempting. But Leorio made a pact with the woods years ago. And now that the time to repay his debt has come, he cannot afford to get caught up in another entanglement, romantic or otherwise. Still he keeps coming back to Kurapika, sure as the tide, even as he begins to wonder how much of his humanity he traded away.





	1. Nix and Tree

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I drifted away somewhat from my original summary as the story grew, but this is a tale heavily inspired by German folklore and relying rather loosely on Paracelsus classification of the nature sprites, so I hope you enjoy!
> 
> A big thank-you goes out to the artists that have been assigned for my fic, fa-chi and endlexina on tumblr, they did really lovely art for this, I have been blessed.

The woods gave and the woods took.

This was a rule as old as the trees and the soil they grew from; the soil they would turn into when they grew brittle and decayed. Sadly, when it came to the details of the taking and the giving, things appeared to be less set in stone. While it wasn’t uncommon for humans to strike a bargain with the woods, the powers resting underneath the whispering foliage were older than the bureaucracy that the human race was so fond of. There was no contract that could be read before signing, no three-year-plan that explained to you how to pay back your debt, interest included.

The whole process looked a lot more like this: you stumbled into the woods with only your wish to guide you, ignoring the hissing and rustling that your presence caused, hoping that the pressure you felt at the back of your neck was an envoy of this place watching over you, still trying to decide if you were worthy of being led into the heart of the woods.

Because if you made it that far – if you took your chances following the right beast at the right time and it brought you to a clearing where the air was lighter and sweeter, where you were greeted by the creaking of bark as the trees stretched their branches further, just like a human would stand straighter to make a good impression – then you could shout your wish to the skies and you would be heard.

Leorio's wish had been so beyond anything he could ever repay that he hadn't expected the woods to fulfill it, but he still had to try. He had promised himself that he would do anything if it could only save his best, his only dear friend, and how could he have kept this promise if he did not put an inkling of faith into magic he had seen with his own eyes? 

When he walked into the woods he expected to be denied, even as he found the deer and followed its trail. But the woods answered his call. And they sent him home with a promise, not a demand.

_ You will come for us when you're ready. _

Six years had passed since then.

He had seen his classmates move out of town in pursuit of a career, a better education or love, knowing he was bound to stay. He had been waiting. And then that woman had stepped into his life and he knew that one way or the other, he would be free of his debt tonight.

 

A large street of asphalt separated the outskirts of town from the woods like a border. Every morning when he went to the clinic and every evening when he went home again, he followed the curve of this street although he could have taken a shorter, more direct path. It just seemed fitting: should the woods have business with him, he gave them a chance to make themselves known.

Needless to say, not much had come from this. Sometimes he thought he could catch a glimpse of a golden hide deeper in, but it might have been a trick of the light or plain old wishful thinking.

The woman however had stood at the bus stop on the town's side of the street, so he hadn't considered her odd until she raised her voice.

_ “Would you care for a dance?” _

Leorio had known right away she wasn't human. Her black curls looked slick and wet like an oil spill, her eyes shimmered dark like the water at the bottom of a well. Her linen dress fell down to the ground, obscuring her legs from view entirely, but leaving her arms bare. Despite the frosty January air, her skin was smooth, her breath did not cloud. She shyly covered her mouth when she spoke.

Leorio wore a pair of long thermo underwear under his pink nurse scrubs and he still felt like a popsicle. He jogged over to her to ask the lady if she wasn't cold.

She batted her lashes.

_ “Perhaps you could warm me up?” _

His eyes were drawn to the soaked hem of her dress. He did not offer her his jacket. He did not want to offer her anything, yet he heard himself say: “If you take off your dress, we can arrange that.”

She smiled without showing teeth. When she took him by the wrist to lead him between the trees, he did not resist.

 

Leorio was sure she was barefoot, although her long dress smoothed over any prints she might have left in the snow and the longer he followed her, the harder it became to ignore the little voice in his head telling him he was making a terrible mistake.

When he asked her how far they still had to go she turned to him, and kissed him with cold purple lips. She tasted like spring water and smelled like algae bloom.

He did not ask again.

A crow called out somewhere. It sounded like mocking laughter.

 

She led him past a patch of Christmas roses, about the size of a hand. There was nothing unusual about Christmas roses around this time of the year, but close to this patch was another. And another. A whole trail of them, zig-zagging through the soft glowing blanket of snow. Leorio followed it with his eyes, hoping, again,  to see a flash of gold-

The woman tugged at his hand, impatiently. Beckoning with a sweet voice and sweeter words to lead him away from the obvious path laid out before him. His body grew numb. His legs tingled as they responded to her magic.

_ I shouldn’t have let her kiss me _ , he realized, a bit belated. A stupid mistake, really. The woods may not come with a rule book, but exchanging body fluids seemed like an obvious way to cast a spell on someone. And now that she had him on a hook, it would be easy for her to lure him into the murky depths that she had risen from, to… to do what? Kill him? Fuck him? Force him to do her household chores? Neither seemed a pleasant fate.

Leorio found that while his legs moved with a will of their own, he could still wriggle his toes and arch his feet as he pleased. He held tight onto his captor, braced himself for a fall... and tripped himself. In the last moment he turned, so that his shoulder would catch most of the impact. The woman let out the quietest yelp as he yanked her down with him; she fell on her ass. In the following scuffle, Leorio caught hold of her dress’ skirt and pulled it up, exposing a pair of webbed, green-scaled feet.

She shrieked as if he had struck her. Almost immediately, she tore the fabric from his hands to cover herself again, but it didn’t matter: the spell was broken. 

The feeling returned to his body, just as she kicked him in the face. His nose transformed into a starburst of pain; the world turned black, then clouded with haze as his eyes overflowed with tears that trickled hot over his cheeks. 

When he could see again, the woman - the creature - had fled. Leorio got to his feet. He brushed the half-melted snow from his now soaked pant legs. Already, the cold was gnawing at his thigh greedily and when he tipped his head forward, three droplets of blood dripped into the snow. He stared at them and thought,  _ thank god I’m not wishing for a child _ .

Then he followed the path of the flowers.

 

The further he went, the thinner and wetter the snow grew. Old, naked brambles poked through the underbrush and the Christmas roses grew plenty - so plenty indeed, that his path disappeared in a narrow riverbed framed by the little white flowers. Leorio looked left and right, but the path did not continue.

He cursed.

“Easy there, you don’t want to upset him even more than you already have,” a boy’s voice called from the skies, accompanied by a flutter of wings. On the branch of an age-bent willow, low enough so Leorio didn’t have to crane his head much to spot it, a white crow settled.

“I didn’t even do anything,” Leorio muttered, hunching up his shoulders defensively. “Unless you count upsetting that…  _ lady _ , but I wasn’t exactly in the mood to get killed by a water nix today.”

The crow’s beady eyes glistened and it clacked his beak and shuffled a few steps to the side, before it said: “If you knew what she was, why did you follow her in the first place,  _ idiot? _ ”

“I thought she was supposed to collect my debt.”

“How is killing you going to benefit the woods?”

Leorio lowered his face, blood rushing to his cheeks. How it hurt his pride to be mocked, and by a bird no less. “A life for a life,” he said without conviction. It had made more sense in the heat of the moment, when he had been forced to make a choice. 

“And a kill for a kill,” the white crow retorted, flapping agitated. “Did you ask for a kill?”

Leorio’s shoulders slumped. “No.”

“See?” The bird cackled and started to preen his feathers.

Leorio threw up his hands in frustration. “So what do I need to do? What do you want from me?” 

“How would I know? I’m a lookout, not a secretary. If you must know, ask  _ him _ . I’m sure he’s still nearby, sulking.”

“No.” He was sick of stumbling in the dark. His pants were getting more uncomfortable any minute and he felt like he was being sent on yet another wild goose chase. “You will take me to the heart of the woods. If the stag has business with me, he will meet me there, but I’m done waiting for him.” Leorio was bluffing, to an extent. It was true that he was tired, that with every passing year he became more anxious about putting his life on halt because he was duty bound to a _ tree _ . But he could not have turned his back on the golden stag even if he wanted to.

 

During the complicated tightrope walk of puberty and before Pietro fell ill, Leorio spared little thought for the woods aside from being a place that kept your secrets. Back then, the landscapes he was most eager to explore where the little dips and valleys of a girl’s body or, when he was brave enough to entertain the thought, he dreamed of scraping his cheek on another boy's prickly chin, of running his hands over ridiculously firm legs. Boys had a strange appeal because they always looked a little less complete than the girls, it was them who were a little less skilled at pretending they were fine. Volatile, angry, struggling. Sometimes, he took a boy he liked into the woods to get very, very friendly with him. (The trick was to know how far you had to walk into it to remain unpestered by humans outside or the unimaginable things that grew in its strange light.)  It was during such an occasion when he first saw the deer.

He was sixteen and his head swam from too many alcopops and the rush of kissing another boy, the wonder of not knowing what he was doing with his shaking hands and still feel that it was working - when a snapping twig caught his attention. Of course, the animal had been just as young and lanky as Leorio then, and wearing two nubs on its head where majestic antlers would grow. Pink ranunculi bloomed under its hoofs and in the deers large eyes Leorio found his own surprise and insecurity mirrored. He felt… chosen. Special. Back when he was a teenager, the thought was still alluring.

The boy that Leorio had been with would later claim that the deer had not been that golden, that the flowers had been there before the animal showed up, but Leorio knew better. And he never forgot.

 

Years later, not far from the spot where he first met the deer, the white crow tilted his head this way and that as if to consider Leorio’s terms. Then it raised its grey beak to the night sky and cawed once, twice, thrice. The leaves of the willow shuddered in response and then the rustling spread from tree to tree, like a ripple in water.

The crow hopped off its branch and with a great  _ fwump! _ and a flurry of petals, a young man stood where it had landed, his silver hair tousled and wild. 

Leorio had to take a step back. What made his heart jump in his chest was not the obvious and undeniable display of magic that had happened right before his eyes, but that it usually manifested itself in ways that struck as both dignified and untamed, beautiful and overwhelming. None of which applied to the person in front of him: the crow looked like a kid barely out of highschool that had just robbed a thrift store. He wore a berry toned pullover wide enough to fit two of him, over a pair of jeans capris and his sockless feet were stuffed into white sneakers. 

“Today must be your lucky day,” the crow boy said. “Follow me.”

The soles of his shoes lit up with every step, red and green, red and green.

Well. At least it would be hard to lose him.

 

Although the air grew warmer and the snow grew sparse, the night lost nothing of its brightness; every leaf and pebble was carved in blue shadows, and the bugs that skittered over the bark of the trees glistened like obsidian. 

Leorio knew they were at the right place when the ground dipped low into a round valley. And in its center stood the greatest laurel tree he had ever seen, its roots spreading far on the ground like swelling veins. Fireflies buzzed to and fro, most of them gathering in a glowing cloud by the stem, where a slender woodland creature rested.

The crow boy turned to give a hushed warning that they had reached the sanctuary and that Leorio was to  _ behave _ -

But Leorio heard nothing, saw nothing but the stag whose hide shimmered like liquid green fire in the fireflies’ light. His heartbeat picked up an erratic rhythm that filled his chest with heat and made his cheeks flush.

_ I found you, _ he thought.  _ I really found you. _

It was like falling in love all over again. He half ran, half jumped down the slope. 

The deer startled; it let out a noise of alarm as it struggled to rise on its slender legs, ready to flee - and then froze in place. Leorio came to a skittering halt about an arm's reach in front of the beast. 

“Hi,” he said breathlessly. His head swam. “You’re beautiful.” Beautiful and just as magical as it used to be. If he was honest, he had been afraid to reach this place, this moment, and find it a lot more mundane than his scared nineteen year old self remembered.

The deer’s ears flicked expectantly, but it kept its head ducked low. Its antlers spread skywards like gnarly twin branches.

“I-um.” Leorio ran a hand through his hair as the first flutter of anxiety disrupted his delight. How did you address a magical beast, much less one that was obviously part of the woodland’s high society? “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Do you... remember me?”

“He doesn’t speak,” the crow boy called out. “Not as he is.”

Leorio looked back, unsure what to make of this. “Then how am I supposed to ask him about my debt?”

“Oh, you can ask him all you want. I never said you’d get an answer, did I?”

“Well, fuck you too,” Leorio muttered. He would have emphasized his words with an appropriate gesture, but deemed it rather unwise since corvids knew how to hold a grudge. He felt a tug at his sleeves. The stag pulled at his parka, beckoning him to get closer. 

“Listen,” Leorio said softly. He knelt and brought up his hand to stroke the animals slender but muscular neck. “I know I was told to come back when I’m ready and honestly? I’m not sure if I am. But if you seriously expect me to repay my debt, you have to tell me  _ how _ . I have a right to know how this is going to mess up my life so I can make preparations.”

The stag let out a shaky breath through its muzzle that hit Leorio right in the face. It smelled like all things fresh and clean: like sun warmed grass and dew studded moss, like sage and basil. And then the golden beast shook loose, and dashed away into the night.

“Wait!”, Leorio yelled.

Bright light hit the side of his face, blinding him and ruining every chance of catching up on the stag.

_ You have to forgive my son,  _ a playful voice rang in his head, _ He’s at a complicated age. _

Leorio squinted against the light. It grew stronger, pouring from the cracks in the laurel tree’s bark like honey, but gathering mid-air until it vaguely resembled a person. The spirit of the tree.

Looking at her hurt, but he could not tear his eyes away even if he tried, so he kept looking until tears streamed down his cheeks and then he looked some more.

Her hair curled around her face like lily petals, her skin shone like amber, glossy and plump. She wore a dress of finely laced white roots, the kind that sprouted first and stretched far, stubbornly conquering new soil. Her eyes were dark, imploring, but undeniably cheerful.

_ Hello, child. _ She said.  _ You have grown quite a bit. How is your friend doing? Still faring well, I hope. _

She talked like a mother. Not like his mother - but the mother of a friend. Gentle, approachable. Nurturing. The kind of woman who offered you ice cream with a topping of advocaat while you were at her house, waiting for your pal to come back from his training. But there was more to her than that. By all means and purposes, she  _ was _ these woods, a manifestation of its will and desires, a being of power, the source of its magic. In older times, she might have been worshipped as a goddess and even Leorio, who grew up with a catholic family and a mother who had nothing but bitterness to spare for the Christian god, could not help but feel awed and humbled in her presence.

“He’s doing good. He made it to university. He’s studying to become an engineer and-” Leorio swallowed. Would she even understand what an engineer was? But she had provided the miracle that made it all possible. Pietro’s achievements were her achievements in a way. “He still calls and writes sometimes. Thank you. Thank you so, so much for making this possible. My debt to you. How can I repay it?  _ When _ can I repay it?”

She bowed down and brushed the tears from his cheek. A little frown disturbed her features. He still flinched when her voice resonated in his head rather than carry through the air.  _ Little One. I wish I could give you a simple answer, but see, that burden should not be yours to bear. It should have been your friend who made the plea for his life. Him I could have denied. But you… _

She sighed quite maidenly. Tilted her head.  _ I wish I would not need your aid. But mankind has grown harsh and cruel towards us and while we might not prevail this war they wage on us, I want to live long enough to see my son grow old. _

“He’ll grow old?”

Somehow, Leorio had never considered the concept of aging would apply to the magical dwellers of this forest although he remembers a time  _ before _ the stag. The Will of the woods, lost in her own thoughts, did not deign an answer to his question. Instead, she hummed thoughtfully. She called him by his name, and then another name which he immediately forgot, but that sounded like someone had chimed a bell inside his heart.  _ Will you serve us?,  _ she asked. _ Will you protect and defend us?  _

“Does that require turning my back on my old life and start living in the woods? Because if that’s the case I’d like to go back one more time and make some preparations, say my goodbyes.”

_ There will always be a place for you here if you wish. But no, you can go on with your human life as you please, as long as you come when we call for you. And one more thing. _

“What is it?”

_ You cannot fulfill your duty as you are. You must become stronger.  _ She hesitated.  _ I can help you gain strength, but I cannot show you how to wield it.  _

“Uh, that’s okay.” Leorio tried to smile reassuringly, but with his weeping, burning eyes, it might have come out more of a grimace. “I’m good at figuring things out.”

_ Perhaps you are. But if you ever feel lost, find my son.  _ Slowly, she brought her hand up to her head and broke off a yellow strand of her lily hair which she offered Leorio.  _ Eat this _ , she prompted. Gingerly, he picked the petal up, searched her face once more for permission, and put it on his tongue. 

She smiled.  _ I used to work my magic with kisses, you know, but then I met my husband and he is so strange about these things. Humans! Always so sensitive. _

Leorio was about to ask her how the fuck a tree could get married, when his tongue went numb and his mouth filled with the taste of sweet nectar. His vision blurred stronger than ever. A shiver went through his spine… and then his skin started to feel hot and taut as if corrupted by an infection. He was sweating. He was shivering. He was suffocating in his own clothes. Blinded and howling with pain, Leorio yanked and pulled and scraped off his clothes until he was free and raw and malleable.

He shifted. His mind spilled from its web of neurons into the network of roots below.

He breathed as the wood breathed, he grew as the wood grew.

Leorio Paladiknight woke up.


	2. Kurapika

Leorio was lured back into consciousness by the smell of eggs frying in a pan and the ferocious growl that his body uttered in response. He stretched his limbs under the heavy weight of what had to be a down blanket until his feet poked out into the chilly morning air. 

Leorio was in no mood to get up. He felt sore all over and the bed was warm and soft against his naked skin. Somewhere, wood creaked under the weight of footsteps.

Too late he realized there were no wooden floorboards in his apartment, just shitty linoleum floors over concrete. His eyes flew open. 

Green flooded Leorio’s vision.

The roof was overgrown with leaves on thick, bulbous vines.

His heart nearly leaped out of his chest when someone rapped at the door.

“You need to get up now if you want to shower,” a completely unfamiliar voice called out. “My father will be home in about half an hour and I’d prefer it if you were decent by then.”

Leorio’s mind was blank. He quickly scanned the room for anything that might jog his memory, but neither the pale green walls not the light honey brown furniture spoke to him. To his right there was a wardrobe, a dresser, a desk. To his left there was a nightstand stacked with books of various sizes, bookmarks peeking out of their pages: hardcover, paperbacks, a magazine. Two high bookshelves framed the door. If not for the abundance of thick vines affixed to the walls and ceiling, the room could have belonged to anyone with a sense of order. Also, he was not a plant guy per se, but they had a few orchids in the clinic, which were lovingly tended to by one of the other nurses and this plant with its branching bulbs and short, blade-shaped leaves somewhat reminded him of a dendrobium orchid. Its vines traced back to one pot perched on top of a footstool by a single large window that was set into the wall across from the bed and where the view was not obscured by a procession of more potted plants on the sill, it revealed only the grey winter sky. 

No dreamy little houses with colorful fronts. He wasn’t in town, then. Where the fuck was he?

Also, he couldn’t see his clothes lying anywhere.  _ Shit _ .

“Hello? Are you awake?” 

Was his host a boy or a girl? Leorio could not tell by the voice, nor by the interior.

“I am!”, he called back, scratching his head. What the fuck had happened last night? He remembered going into the woods-

The woods. 

_ Shitshitshit _ . 

Leorio had grown up with the stories about people going into the woods and coming back severely aged or people disappearing for months and then returning with a nervous look about their eyes, unable to speak about what they had seen. But those were  _ old _ tales and unless you were stupid enough to bargain with your own lifetime, you were safe from this kind of fuckery. Or so he thought. 

How much time had he lost?

“You don’t know what happened to my clothes, do you?”, he asked because he wasn’t going to get anywhere naked.

“You weren’t wearing any when I found you.”

Leorio blinked. He went over the words again in his mind to make sure he heard that right- Groaning and sighing, he dragged a hand over his face. This had to be a new low in his life.

“There’s a bathrobe on the chair by the desk and I left you some clothes in the bathroom. It’s the second door to the left.”

“ _ Thank you _ ,” Leorio said, his voice cracking as he grew painfully aware that the owner of the helpful voice outside the door had seen him  _ butt naked _ . With his dick out. He was never going to be able to see them in the eyes.

“If you’re ready, just follow the hallway to the end and you’ll find the kitchen. I’m Kurapika, by the way.”

“Leorio. I mean, I’m- that’s my name. Yeah.” Perhaps he should consider sneaking out and finding his way back home after he got some clothes on his back, to avoid a really awkward conversation. And then he could always send back the borrowed clothes with the post. 

But when he swung his stiff legs out of bed and took his first steps, the floor groaned and creaked under his weight. Right. So much for sneaking.

Leorio went to the desk to pick up the bathrobe, even though he had trouble wriggling his arms in. The hem fell only to his knees.  _ Sexy _ , he thought sarcastically and shuffled closer to the window, to get a better view of the area.

Empty land, barren fields greeted him, seaming the accursed woods. He should go right back in and rattle some trees, demand an explanation.

_ ‘And then what? They’ll turn me to stone?’ _

He hadn’t realized he was biting on his thumb until sand crunched between his teeth. Leorio checked his hands. Black sickles of dirt had ingrained under his fingernails, some of his knuckles were encrusted with old blood. He looked at the soles of his feet. Grey as charcoal.

He really needed that shower.

 

The bathroom was barely larger than a supply closet, so Kurapika had left the promised clothes and a towel on the toilet. A pair of house slippers was waiting for Leorio in front of the shower, too. All looking pristine and smelling like cheap laundry detergent. They made him feel twice as dirty.

To make it worse, he caught a glimpse of his face in the bathroom mirror and had to do a double check. A discolored spot sat on the bridge of his nose, all that was left from his confrontation with the nix. The bruise was already yellow, its edges fading roughly into the shape of a butterfly. Bruises did not fade over night; it must have been  _ days _ since he walked into the woods. Some of which he had failed to show up at work. His heart sank as he imagined Dr. Yorkshire calling him over and over again while his phone rang in his jacket and god only knew where that had ended up.

He was royally screwed.

Leorio showered as cold as he could handle, while scrubbing eagerly away at his hands and feet until his skin was pink and he shivered all over, let the cold distract him from the looming threat of being fired from the only good job he had gotten in this goddamn town. He wondered if  _ ‘hey I’m really sorry I didn’t show up but the woods held me hostage’ _ qualified as a proper excuse for his absence. Probably not. But he’d better come up with a good explanation quick because with a little luck, Kurapika had a phone he could use although this was a call he did not look forward to.

Leorio dressed, desperate to get warm again. The boxer briefs sat a bit loose on his hips, the same could be said for a pair of jeans that left his ankles naked. Meanwhile the green flannel shirt proved somewhat tight around the arms and especially the shoulders. He left it unbuttoned over most of his chest even though it made him feel like a TV-cop in an 80s crime show, showing off his manly cleavage. This was not quite how he imagined to make a good first impression. Or a good second impression, for that matter.

 

When he stepped back into the hallway with the bathrobe casually slung over his arms, a new tempting scent had spread through the house, of sweet herbs and freshly baked white bread. It smelled like heaven and warmth and comfort. Leorio was instantly drawn to it, but when he reached the end of the hallway, he waited cautiously.

The front of the house was occupied by a single room, the front door marking the border between the kitchen area and the living area. Kurapika was busy in front of the oven, frantically waving away a cloud of heat with a potholder, a veil of fine golden hair hiding their face. They grabbed a loaf and turned to put it on a wooden tray on the kitchen island to cool, barely sparing Leorio a glance. “Morning,” they said.

He could not reply, only stare.

Kurapika was easily the prettiest boy Leorio had ever seen, with deep brown doe eyes and thick lashes, a stubborn pink mouth, a soft jaw. His long neck only showed the hint of an adam’s apple, which didn’t make it any less kissable. He wasn’t very tall and he looked kind of fragile in his oversized black sweater and Leorio was struggling to breathe as his body suddenly remembered that it has been years since he last touched someone with sensual intent.

“Are you alright?”, Kurapika asked and picked up another loaf, dropping it right next to the other. “You didn’t take a blow to the head, did you?”

“I’m fine,” he squeaked, knowing very well where he would want to take a blow right now,  _ thankyouverymuch _ . Leorio tried to listen to the tiny voice of reason somewhere in his mind that told him to not be a creep, for fuck’s sake. Besides, Kurapika had already seen all of him and did he look impressed? Or even slightly flustered? Not at all. “Listen, I know this might sound weird but-” Leorio stopped himself because there was something intimidating and  _ intense _ about the way Kurapika listened: brows slightly furrowed, never breaking eye contact, like a cat waiting to pounce. He didn’t seem to give a shit about looking amiable, but there could be no doubt that Leorio had his full attention. “Did I do something wrong?”

“That’s a very broad question, Leorio,” Kurapika replied dryly. “Can you specify it?”

“I don’t know, you’re looking at me like I did. And I can’t exactly remember what happened before- wait, what day is today?”

“Saturday.”

“Saturday,  _ February 11th _ ?”, Leorio blurted out. He’d disappeared into the woods on the third, which meant-

“No, it’s the fourth.” Kurapika’s eyes narrowed and a little wrinkle carved between his brows. “What do you mean you can’t remember?”

“But-” Leorio rubbed the bridge of his nose. It didn’t even hurt anymore. Whatever the Will of the woods had done to him must have also healed up his nose. That, or the time inside the woods had progressed faster than outside, which was a terrible, terrible thought. “I don’t know, my brain is still pretty sluggish.”

“I noticed.” 

It seemed that Kurapika was a lot less helpful in words as he was in actions. Actually, he was kind of a prick.

“I think someone slipped me something and robbed me. So if you could tell me where and how you found me, maybe I can backtrack my steps.”

“You were right on our porch, unconscious and you can be glad that you were. Dad says it’s not safe to be out at night, that close to the woods.”

“Because of the animals?”

“Ye,” Kurapika sneered. “The  _ animals _ .”

Leorio felt a chill travel down his spine as he remembered the nix and the way she covered her mouth to hide her teeth. He had known what he faced there, to an extent. But he wondered what else lived in the woods, tolerated by the Will but not bowing to her authority. Did her influence weaken at night because she was also a tree? 

“Maybe refrain from opening the door at night then. In the future I mean.”

The corner of Kurapika’s mouth twitched. He opened a drawer and pulled out a rather large bread knife. He gestured at Leorio with the tip (the very sharp and pointy looking tip) and, keeping a most conversational tone, he said: “Do you really think you’re the first human shaped thing to show up on my doorstep? Do you think I didn’t take any precautions? I fired a warning shot into the night to make sure you weren’t just pretending and when you didn’t flinch, I told you that you were not welcome in this house if you harbored evil intentions. I even contemplated putting a blade to your more sensitive parts to see if that would get an reaction, but I was content with sprinkling salt over your feet. And then, after I dragged you over the threshold, I put you into a room full of cleansing plants to get rid of any foul residue that you might have picked up. All in all, I think I have a very good grasp of how to fare with the things that come from the woods. So,  _ in the future _ , I’d prefer if you kept your unsolicited advice to yourself. Ye hear me?”

Leorio cleared his throat. “Yessir,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

“Good,” Kurapika chirped and lowered the knife. He reached for a loaf and started cutting off thick slices. The crust looked crisp and glazed, and crunched and cracked under the blade in a most satisfying way. “Now that we talked about that, would you  _ please _ sit down, you are making me nervous.” 

“ _ I  _ am making  _ you _ nervous?”, Leorio scoffed, but he was already getting distracted by the promise of food. It was like some mediating element in him had broken and now he was doomed to experience his cravings in extremes. He wasn’t just hungry, he was  _ starving _ . He picked a chair and draped the bathrobe over the backrest, before sitting down, legs half-spread.

“I wasn’t going to actually hurt you, fool,” Kurapika announced to the bread.

“Hm? Are you referring to right now or last night when you considered cutting off my dick, I’m curious.”

Kurapika just snickered at that because he was a rude little shit. It was just Leorio’s luck that all the cute boys had ugly personalities to match - that way, if he let them fuck him over, he had no one to blame but himself.

“We don’t have a landline, by the way. If you need to call someone, I can lend you my phone, just… no police. Not until you’re off the property.”

“Why would I-”, Leorio started until he remembered his little lie. Well. What else had he been supposed to say? ‘A strange tree lady gave me a piece of her hair to eat and it sent me tripping?’ “Right. No, I don’t think they're going to help much in this situation. And I’m fine, aren’t I?” He crossed his arms in front of his chest.

Kurapika blew his bangs out of his forehead. “So, do you need to make a call? Anyone who might worry why you didn’t come home last night?”

“Nah, I’m pretty much on my own.” Leorio scratched his neck. If he thought about it, it was kind of sad that the first one to notice was his boss. Or the cute blond waiter at the pizzeria where Leorio picked up dinner more often than he cared to admit. 

“I see,” Kurapika said in this smug, knowing way that made Leorio want to punch him a little.

 

But for all his conceited attitude and knife-wielding tendencies, Kurapika made a pretty decent host; assuming your idea of a decent host was someone who snapped at you for trying to help him set the table and who kept on giving you seconds you didn’t ask for, assuring that “you could do with a bit more meat on your bones”. (When Leorio tried to argue, Kurapika scrunched up his nose, looked him up and down and added: “Well, some bones at least.” Leorio stopped arguing after that.)

Eventually, after providing a vast supply of preserves and putting down plates for two more people, Kurapika sat down next to Leorio. Leaning quite into Leorio’s personal space, he propped his chin on his hands and asked in a pointedly conversational tone:  "So, what do you do when you’re not busy collapsing on other people’s porches?" 

“Pardon?”, Leorio asked, and spread a generous helping of scrambled eggs on his mediterranean bread. The amount was surely bad for his heart but the eggs were too fluffy and delightfully salty to pass. 

“Like, where do you work.”

“Oh.” He had to force himself to take small bites, so he wouldn’t chew for hours like an idiot. “I’m a nurse at the maternity clinic. It’s pretty cool because you’re surrounded by women all day, but most of them are pregnant, so you gotta tone down the flirting a bit, unless you want to get decked in the face. By the respective partners, I mean. Not the women.”

“Is that how you got the bruise?”

“No, I was… yes. yes that is exactly how I got that bruise.”

Kurapika chortled. It was an adorable sound, undignified and giddy and Leorio felt his mouth curl into an embarrassed smile. “I mean, I swear, I’m not actually hitting on them, I’m not a creep, I’m just trying to brighten their day a little.”

“Have you considered being equally charming to their partners so they don’t feel left out?”

“I have but I’m afraid that’ll earn me more punches, not less.”

An engine reared in the distance.

Kurapika’s head perked up, the mirth slipped from his face. “That’s probably my dad,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” When he stood up, he rested his hand on Leorio’s shoulder. It felt like a promise and an accomplishment at once. 

(He also used the fact that Kurapika turned his back on him to inhale inhale the rest of his food without having to worry about some handsome bastard seeing egg falling out of his face in the most unattractive way. Regret set in when he choked a little.)

Kurapika left the door open when he stepped onto the porch, inviting the cold to creep in. Snow crunched under heavy tires. The engine died. A car door was slammed shut and happy greetings offered - the words were muddled but the intention still carried.

“You're late!”, Kurapika shouted. Leorio could detect no criticism, only relief and a hint of teasing. There was also a dog somewhere, judging by the over excited yapping and Kurapika’s breathy laughter. “Calm down, Gon, you haven’t been gone  _ that _ long. Did you have a safe trip? I hope you - nonono,” his voice dropped to a chiding tone. “We have a  _ visitor _ . You know what this means, right?  _ Behave _ .”

Leorio would have liked a moment to inform that he was not good with dogs, something about his scent always threw them off and turned them into whining, yelping bundles of anxiety. Kind of how he felt in large crowds, really. So imagine his surprise at the large canine that rushed in, paws tap-tapping on the floor, heading right towards him with a wagging tail, pink tongue lolling, eyes glowing golden. By the time he realized he wasn’t dealing with a dog, the  beast had already planted its front paws on his chair and was sniffing his face.

“Kurapika? Kurapika, could you-” He struggled to look past the mass of black fur and the row of very sharp and unnaturally white teeth. A wolf. A  _ fucking wolf _ .

“Gon,  _ sit _ ,” Kurapika called and the animal obeyed. He reemerged with his arms full of bagged meat and headed straight for a chest freezer that stood next to the fridge. “Don’t worry, we raised him since he was a pup. He’s gentle as a lamb.”

“Really now.” Even if that was true, in its sitting position the animal reached up to Kurapika’s shoulders, a large heap of muscled power that could cause a lot of harm, purposefully or not.

“Gon, say hi,” Kurapika encouraged with one arm submerged in the freezer. The wolf raised his head and let out a short howl.

And then, carrying what appeared to be two frozen, skinned rabbits wrapped in clear plastic bags, Efraim Kurta showed up on the doorstep.

Leorio knew about Efraim. Everyone in town knew about Efraim, because despite the fact that he had bought his farm long before Leorio was even born, he was still considered a stranger and therefore regarded with a mix of suspicion, haughtiness and sensationalism and the townspeople resented him deeply for not trying to fit in. Not that they  _ wanted _ him to, but since he made himself sparse there was not much gossip to be had about him. He never showed up for mass on Sunday and he was said to live alone with only the company of a large dog that guarded his property, no visitors allowed. 

Except there had been a son, once. Leorio had never met the kid, but he had heard about the speculations regarding his mother. Efraim did not wear a ring, nor had he ever been seen with a woman, and he had raised his child all on his own until, maybe ten years ago, the boy disappeared. When asked, Efraim commented that the boy lived with his mother now - which led people to believe that the mother in question must have had a dubious past, something that left her unworthy to be trusted with a child for the longest time and the townsfolk agreed that associating with such a woman did not reflect well on Efraim.

One would be hard pressed to reconcile all the nasty talk with the image of the man who just had entered the house. If one looked past the mountain of meat in his arms, he was the spitting image of an English college professor: with his hair neatly parted to the side and graying around the temples. He even wore a black tweed coat over a white collar shirt and pullover combination. Tweed!

“Hello,” he greeted, his ruddy cheeks glowing from the cold outside. He nudged the door close behind him with his elbow. “That's a nice shirt you're wearing there young man, I own one just like it.”

Leorio, suddenly mindful of his awkward appearance, grabbed hold of the button row and tried to pull it taut over his chest but it didn't change that there was not enough fabric to cover his hairy cleavage. “That's because it's yours, Sir. Your son was kind enough to lend it to me when I, um, misplaced my own.”

“Kind,” Efraim parroted and stomped over to the freezer, where he shooed away Kurapika and stored away his purchases. He shut the lid quietly. “My son. Are you sure it was indeed my son who did the kind thing. Because doing kind things does not sound like something my son would do.”

“ _ Papa _ !”, Kurapika complained and Efraim only laughed.

“If you want to be considered kind, perhaps you should share your own clothes and not just mine, hm?”, he offered jovially.

Kurapika’s mood dropped drastically. The line of his jaw grew taut as he said, with emphasis: “They're  _ hardly _ going to fit!”

“Do me a favor and check again if you can’t find a sweater, you always buy them two sizes too large anyway. Or get one of your brother's. You don't want your friend to get sick, do you?”

“It's alright, I don't get cold as easily,” Leorio chimed in when he noticed the red blotches on Kurapika’s cheeks and the way his fingers balled to fists. His mother had been prone to temper tantrums, one of the charming things Leorio had picked up from her, and he didn’t want to be the cause for the one that was brewing in Kurapika - but it seemed like his efforts to defuse the situation came too late. Kurapika was already stomping out of the kitchen, wearing an expression as dark as a thunderstorm. The wolf yipped, then followed on his heels.

“He means well.” Efraim shrugged off his coat and hung it up by the door, then picked the seat on the opposite site of the table. “But you gotta be patient with him at this time of the year. He gets snappish. It's the lack of sun.”

“Ah,” Leorio said because he didn't know what else to say.

“How come you misplaced your clothes?”

“I'm not sure, exactly.”

“Ah,” Efraim said, mirroring Leorio’s tone. And then he took a slice of bread and started smearing fig jam on it, without uttering another question. 

The minutes that it took for Kurapika to return stretched  _ endlessly _ , and when he did, his mood was still a bit frosty. He mostly graced his own father with a cold shoulder, though. Aside from a simple navy blue sweater (which clashed a bit with the frog green of the flannel shirt, but Leorio was not going to complain), he had also brought a large pilot jacket, a scarf, gloves, a hat. The sweater and the scarf carried a whiff of the same sweet floral perfume.

Although the sweater was the right size, the sleeves were ridiculously tight and Leorio had a hard time adjusting them with the shirt.

“Don’t ruin it, it’s my favorite,” Kurapika warned.

“It’s yours?”

“Obviously.”

_ Obviously _ , Men’s sweaters were cut with more wiggle room. So,  _ obviously, _ Kurapika owned women’s sweaters and liked to smell like a whole bouquet of flowers on occasion. No big deal. Except Leorio couldn’t come up with a single heterosexual explanation for this.

Kurapika being a cute boy with a terrible attitude was one thing. But being a cute, dateable boy with a terrible attitude could really get Leorio in trouble.  _ ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ _ he told himself. But when Kurapika had enough of watching him fumble and bowed down to fix his sleeves, Leorio broke out in goosebumps and heat crawled up his neck.  _ ‘Fuck.’ _

 

At the other side of the table, Efraim unfolded a newspaper with much more rustling than strictly necessary. It was strange for him to see Kurapika care about a stranger. After what had happened to Pairo, Kurapika had shunned any human contact; he had disappeared in the woods for months, not sparing the farm so much as a visit. He had refused to  _ speak _ except sometimes to Gon. Not to mention his animosity when Gon brought home Killua a year later, despite the fact that this kid was the epitome of a forest dweller, from his trickster god personality to his horrible interpretation of fashion, there was nothing inherently human about Killua.

Yet there Kurapika was, draping a scarf around Leorio's neck with all the gruff fondness of a disgruntled grandmother.

Efraim watched them half-hidden behind his paper, feigning disinterest, but very aware of the embarrassed and secretly delighted smiles Leorio had for his son. Perhaps they weren’t so unfamiliar with each other after all.

“Kura,” he called throughout his son's second attempt to give directions and beckoned him closer. He put the newspaper away, folding it with great care. “Maybe you should go with your friend,” he suggested. “But be careful, the roads are not quite what they used to be. I had to drive around town to get here because something dug up the asphalt.”

“That's strange,” Kurapika replied, just convincing enough to maybe fool Leorio.

“You didn't hear anything last night, did you? Our fields-”

“Have been visited by boars.” Quick answer. Too quick.

Efraim dropped his voice. “Was this before or after your friend showed up?”

Kurapika crouched down in front of his father and took one of Efraim's rough hands in his own, lotus-smooth one. “Papa, please,” he said. No hint of petulance in his maroon eyes, for once. They spoke of things he could not say out loud. “Spare your concerns for mama. You're going to go visit her later, aren't you?”

More often than he wanted to admit, Efraim asked himself if his son was the kind of wonder he should not have asked for. Kurapika could be earnest and open if he wanted to and he was terrifyingly bright, but even on his better days he was never… simple. His immaturity did not exclude the deep rooted wisdom he inherited and in moments like these, Efraim always felt small and clueless. He knew, he would never fully grasp the nature of his child... or his wife for that matter. He knew all the ways in which they could say ‘this is the woods working, stay out of this’ and sometimes he caught himself fearing what they were capable of-

And he was ashamed for it. He had known when he married her that Sylvia did not understand cruelty the way humans did, which was neither a virtue nor a flaw. 

“I will,” he promised. “Shall I wait for you?”

“I see her more often than you do.”

“Right. Don't be out too long, it's freezing outside. Oh and-” he nudged his head in Leorio's direction and whispered: “Is this the same boy you've been  _ fawning _ over for years now?”

Kurapika groaned. Then groaned some more when he became aware of the word choice. This was better: embarrassment was something Efraim could understand and relish.

“We’re leaving,” Kurapika announced loudly and turned on his heels, pulling along a somewhat befuddled Leorio. Efraim cheerfully waved them goodbye.

At the sound of the door closing shut, Gon came traipsing back and poked his head into the kitchen.

“Do you want breakfast?”

The wolf raised on his hind paws and shook his fur - his shape blurred and changed until a sturdy young man stood in its place. Gon picked his seat next to Efraim and reached for the peanut butter. And the nutella.  _ And _ the bananas. “I like him,” he said, obvious to the disgusted face Efraim made when he mashed all of it onto the bread. “He smells like dirt.”

“Don't tell Kurapika that, he might eat him,” Efraim muttered.

Leorio Paladiknight. Rosa’s boy. He had a terrible feeling about this.


	3. Growing Pains

Growing up, it had made sense to Leorio that the place he was born in was deeply linked to folklore. It was one of those towns that looked like it had not changed or grown much in decades, with its one and two story houses that lay scattered like some bored god had emptied a bag of them all over the meadow. Spiderwebs of alleys spun between the houses so that it was near impossible to give directions or take a straightforward path, but it the town was also small enough to not get lost in it since you always came out  _ somewhere _ .

A churchyard claimed the highest hill that had once been used as a graveyard - until a new one had been built about 100 years ago and the urns had been moved to that new plot, which was bigger and as far away from the woods as possible. The townspeople did not bury their dead as they were, everyone was turned to ashes. ‘To use the space wisely’ they said, but in reality they chose cremation so that no one would have to hold their breath or tuck in their thumbs when they passed by.

Everyone tended to their superstitions as if they were precious pets. Those deemed acceptable were displayed proudly while others were nurtured in private and shared with friends of similar mindset. Therefore it had always seemed to Leorio like the belief in the powers of the woods had been both common and secret: everyone knew that they were a place to be avoided, a place not to be disrespected but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who would _ talk _ about it.

Then, in the fateful night that Leorio could not remember, the face of the town changed. Suddenly everyone was whispering about a great beast that had come from the woods, with eyes like glowing coals - some said it was a boar, others swore it was a bear. But most of them agreed that they  _ had _ seen it. Even the people who would look at you strange if you suggested that dinosaurs once roamed the earth and who swore that evolution was a lie, even  _ they _ would suddenly speak of the woods like an entity with its own agenda, despite how little it fit into their dichotomy of heaven and hell.

Whatever the creature had been, it had left a physical trail as well. Deep scratches marred the plaster of some buildings and the street that spun around the forest's edge, the one that led to the highway, had been all but ripped open. The bus stop where Leorio had seen the nix had been waltzed down, what remained was bent metal and a glittering lake of sea-green shards. 

The path of destruction led all the way to Dr. Yorkshire's clinic, where the creature had made a turn. But instead of returning to the woods, it ran towards the fields. Towards Efraim Kurta's farm.

It gave Leorio a chill to think that he barely escaped a confrontation with this terrible thing. Even worse to think he might have been the one who caused its frenzy – that he had somehow disturbed its slumber in his stolen hours. (He had found his clothes in the wood. Dirty, discarded, but whole. He must have taken them off himself.) There was no telling what else he might have done or not done unless he asked the person responsible for it, and he was not ready to see the Will just yet. And there was no need to. Surely, she would find a way to call for him, should she need him.

 

It was not like Leorio forgot about the Kurta Farm and its inhabitants either, in fact he found it quite hard to get Kurapika  _ out _ of his head. The petulant curve of his mouth, pink as a tea rose, haunted Leorio's waking dreams in particular. Kind of embarrassing, really. Like he was going through puberty again.

And when he returned there, a week later, to give back the clothes that he'd been lent, Kurapika tilted his head in the most adorable way, looked up at him and said: “I wouldn't mind if you show your face here again, by the way.” In the time it took for Leorio to process this, he wrote down his number and slipped it in Leorio's coat pocket.

He did not call and he did not go back.

 

Then spring came and Leorio dreamed of choking. Such dreams were nothing new: usually his teeth fell out, or his mouth filled with shards of glass and he could not breathe for the sharp things that dug into his throat.

This time, he coughed up dirt and bees. Plants grew from his body, their green tendrils dug into his skin and bound him. Fairy rings grew on the top of his head. His back burst open and his spine had turned into a vein of ore.

Some nights, he drank cheap wine until he got sick and dizzy because that put a damper to the weird dreams even though it made him sweat all night long. He was fine. He had been worse.

 

He was too absorbed in his attempts to regain a state of okay-ness, that he never noticed nor cared when the hunters showed up. They strutted about town, showing their faces in the bars and cafés and on the marketplace, everywhere where gossip was woven. They asked about the big animal and if anyone had seen it since it had caused its destructive ruckus.

The people said no. The people said that folks these days just loved to exaggerate, that sometimes the forest animals just got confused and roamed the streets by the forest and who could tell if it really had been a boar or a bear? Most likely, it had just been a prank by the bored youths. There was no game to be had in their forest, the villagers said. Too little to be hunted. Too docile to be a threat.

But as they spoke their eyes were drawn to the plants that grew ferociously in all the spots that had been dug up.

Up on a rooftop, a white crow sat and watched.

 

* * *

 

It started with a terrible itch on his arms. 

Leorio tried his best to ignore it because he was at work and it didn’t look very professional or hygienic if he kept scratching, but he felt as if bugs were crawling all over his skin and it was driving him mad. He tried to scrape his arms subtly at the desk but he was fidgety, unfocused and  _ godfuckingdamnit _ if he could just grate off his entire epidermis everything would be  _ just fine _ .

Except his boss caught him biting his knuckles to distract himself. Oops.

“Leorio, is everything alright?,” Dr. Yorkshire asked in her usual take-no-bullshit tone, straightening her glasses as she scrutinized his guilt-paralyzed form.

“Ya, I’m good,” Leorio replied and his voice squeaked suspiciously. He should have known better than to lie to her. 

Dr. Yorkshire cleared her throat and asked to see his arm. He showed her, a little too confidently, but minutes of intense picking and scratching had left its angry mark: his skin had turned a bright pink, hot in shade and to the touch and it was slightly raised.

“This looks infected,” she concluded.

Leorio wanted to disagree. He fussed and swore that this looked a lot worse than it actually was, but his boss wouldn’t hear any of that: she reminded him that she was the professional, gave him a hydrocortisone cream and told him to go home. If not for himself, then for the sake of their patients and their unborn children who were vulnerable to infections.

Leorio felt stupid. 

Even more so because as soon as he left the little clinic, the itch stopped immediately. Maybe it was the cream. Maybe it was just his nerves that caused it in the first place. 

_ ‘Maybe’ _ , he thought ten minutes later when his heart started to race uncontrollably and strange shivers took a hold of him,  _ ‘there is something actually wrong with me’ _ . Leorio wrapped his arms tight around his frame. The afternoon was bright but chilly, and the elderly folks and young mothers were up and about, taking strolls, chatting, filling the streets. Their presence only added to the discomfort he felt. The sun hurt his eyes, so he kept his head low and focused on the pavement, squinting, bumping his way through the masses.

Leorio spaced out. It took all his effort to focus on his breathing and suppress the shuddering and oh god, he was going to throw up.

He stumbled onto a street, barely checking for cars (there weren’t any, no one wanted to stop by their shitty little town anyways) and sprinted over the broken asphalt until he reached the green patch on the other side.

He had reached the edge of the forest. 

Leorio fell to his knees between yellow and purple crocuses. The scent of broken grass under his fingers was soothing and he wanted nothing more but to rest his head on the fresh green - 

A bird cawed accusingly.

Leorio didn’t look up. He didn’t have to.

He pressed his eyes shut and breathed slowly, until the spell of nausea got better. Then he ventured deeper into the woods.

 

He was not alone. There was the white crow following him, hopping from branch to branch, yes, but there was also a rustling in the air, a hum of power, a sense of…  _ Her. _

He stooped down to touch a tree root and for a moment as short as the firing of a synapsis, his consciousness bled out of his body and jolted through the roots.

Leorio whimpered. His teeth hurt. It was happening again, whatever _ it _ was. 

He knew there were humans in the woods.

He took off his shoes and stuffed his most important belongings - phone, keys, watch and wallet - into them, then put the shoes onto his jacket. 

From up above, the crow boy called out to him. “You don’t have to take off your clothes to transform, you know. It doesn’t exactly feel great, but they won’t get ruined when you turn. Also, no one has to go blind looking at you.” Leorio squinted up to see how the bird fluffed up his feathers and grew until he was a boy once more. He let his legs dangle off the branch. 

“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Leorio replied and thought that Crow Kid talked a lot of shit about being ugly for someone who wore leopard print leggings with shorts and a heavy metal band shirt. 

He wrapped his jacket around his shoes to hide most of the valuables. If he hid his stuff now while his head was still clear, he might retrieve it more easily later. Assuming he would once more wake up without recollection of what he had been doing in the woods. And if he remembered, the better. It was a win-win situation.

“Whatever you say, piggy.”

He hurled himself to his feet, angry heat creeping up his neck. “What the fuck did you call me, you little shit?” 

Crow Boy wore a grin so smug that it made Leorio’s fists itch and the only reason why he didn’t try to climb a tree and punch his teeth out was because he had a strange sense of déja vu, which didn’t make sense. He had nothing in common with a pig. He had also never been so chubby in his youth that he had gotten this nasty nickname from his classmates (no thanks to his eating habits because god, he had eaten concerning amounts of food. Still did, when he was stressed.) But he was still ruffled; while the word meant nothing to him, he felt like it  _ should _ . He also quite felt like teaching that shitty little brat a lesson in respect, but a child was a child, even when it was a bird, and Leorio couldn’t hurt a child, no matter how annoying. So he resorted to glowering.

The crow remained unfazed. He stretched demonstratively, to show how very unimpressed he was and continued his mocking: “If it makes you feel better to pretend what’s happening is not happening, fine. As long as you don’t freak out like last time. You caused quite the spectacle and drawing attention is actually the last thing we need. Thanks to you, there are now more humans crawling through the woods, thinking we got game. Thinking we  _ are _ game.”

“Hunters.” Leorio knew about the intruders. He had felt them in the woods’ system, stomping through the underbrush, dangerously close to  _ Her _ . He scratched his elbow and again wondered what the hell he had done that he was to blame for this. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about you go and find them and have a nice human chat with them to convince them there is nothing worth shooting here? And better hurry before the princeling finds them.”

“Who?”

“The  _ deer _ , stupid. Her highness’ golden child. If he gets to them first, they will not leave these lands unharmed. Or at all.”

Leorio blinked. He was surprised to find how quickly his anger flared up again. “He doesn’t-” he began, then realized that he had no argument, no evidence except for what he knew in his heart. The stag was _ good _ , the stag was powerful and pure and he refused to believe anything else. “He wouldn’t kill a human. No way.”

The crow boy leaned forward on his branch, all of his cocky attitude washed away. “You’ve never seen him angry, have you?”

 

The hunters found him first.

The deer had been lying in a patch of light, drinking in the new strength of the sun. While the lethargy of winter had finally found an end, the days were still short and he liked to recharge during the prosperous midday hours. For this was his secret: as the child of a dryad he too was mostly plant, mimicking the shape of an animal. And unlike his forest dwelling friends, his human form was not a disguise. Still he preferred to sunbathe in his animal skin for it was easier to laze about naked when you were a deer. Raised less questions.

On this particularly beautiful afternoon he had fallen into a tight slumber. All around him, daisies had bloomed; they opened and closed in the rhythm of his breathing.

The hunters advanced quietly. The trees whispered warnings but the boy who was a plant, who was a deer, dreamed of adventures he would never have, of places he would never visit and the promise of danger just added to the experience.

 

“You ever seen something that beautiful?”, Uvogin asked. He was a man so large that his voice boomed even when he whispered. The pelt vest he wore was just one of the trophies he owned, but it was his favorite because he could carry it with him wherever he wanted. Antlers and stuffed heads were impressive but had the disadvantage of being fixed to a wall. He liked to brag, sure, but he liked it even more to show off what he was bragging about. Unlike most hunters, Uvogin did not carry a gun. Shooting was his partner’s job. He liked to be useful in other ways: aside from imitating the mating calls of various species of deer and elks, he had a terrific knack for skinning animals. And the one he had just spotted had the most glorious hide he had ever seen.

Pakunoda, who had always been the more sensible of them, could not quite share Uvogin’s enthusiasm. She reminded him that they were not here for that. Hunting was strictly prohibited in this forest unless one of the larger animals went rogue and started to attack humans, so she was already grouchy that they had come here following a wild rumor. So far, she had not seen any traces that boars lived in this area, much less one that was as high as a man.

“It’s golden,” Uvogin pointed out with childish glee. 

“It certainly is light in color, yes,” Pakunoda was willing to admit. Not as fascinating as a piebald animal, but kind of pretty. “I wonder what’s wrong with its antlers.” 

“Let’s take a picture,” he suggested, except when he said it it meant: let’s wrestle this beast to the ground. He liked to grab things. Maybe that was why he had become an exterminator. Uvogin had 200 pounds and an iron determination working for him, plus the element of surprise: the deer never really stood a chance. He snuck up and had it in a headlock before it was even awake and Uvogin threw one of his large legs over his flank to keep it from getting up and running away.

The deer screamed and thrashed.

“Oh, we got a  _ feisty _ one.” he beamed, when the antlers hit his ear and scratched it deep enough to draw blood. Pakunoda sighed. To think she could have stayed at home with her wife! “Don’t come crying to me if you lose an eye,” she muttered, as she started up her camera.

Just as the lense whirred, the ground beneath Pakunoda started to tremble.

The trees started to groan and sway; their roots shot to the surface and wrapped around the hunters. Pakunoda’s camera fell and was swallowed by the shifting ground.

Uvogin was yanked back from the deer. Within seconds, their role was reversed: the deer took a few dancing steps, turned and trotted back to where Uvo was lying, gnarly roots wrapping tightly around his limbs. Pakunoda could only watch as the animal raised its forelegs, ready to bring its hoofs down hard-

Uvogin’s nose broke with a terrifying crunch and a gush of blood. He roared with pain, a sound more terrifying than she had ever heard from any dying animal. The deer backed away slightly - and lowered its head to look at her.

Pakunoda felt a bubble of fear rise in her chest. There was something not normal about this animal, a spiteful light that glinted in its deep brown eyes. It wasn’t supposed to be smart enough to take revenge, nor was the forest supposed to turn on them. They had made a terrible mistake.

 

Leorio stopped to see, to make sure his eyes did not play a trick on him. He wasn’t even remotely out of breath, but he could still feel sour nausea sit in the back of his throat. He was almost too late, but just in time to realize that the deer he had admired so much could be just as violent as any human. 

The hunters, a man and a woman, lay on the ground, immobilized by a tangle of roots. The lower half of the man’s face was covered in fresh blood that bubbled up around his mouth when he exhaled.

Maybe it was the adrenaline working, maybe it was because freshly grown roots were quite elastic and slippery, but the man pulled free one of his arms and twisted and wriggled out of his restraints. Good for him. Leorio thought that if he helped him free the woman, they might be more susceptible to advice-

The hunter grabbed his prey by the antlers and hauled it up. Leorio opened his mouth to scream but there was no noise left in his body, no air in his lungs when stag toppled to the ground and its left antler broke off as easy as snapping a dry twig.

A red curtain fell over Leorio’s consciousness.

 

Uvogin was too focused on pulling the roots off Paku to notice the mountain of fur that was rising up beneath the trees until it let out an eardrum-bursting squeak. The boar’s night-black hide steamed with heat. He advanced and slowly swung his head - and swept away Uvogin with the force of a monster truck. 

When the boar exhaled, his warm breath enveloped Pakunoda, smelling like summer rain. She closed her eyes and thought of Machi, who had complained again and again that these hunting trips would one day lead to one of them getting killed. She might have pictured something like them getting shot by another hunter but ultimately, she had been right. Paku found some solace thinking of her little wife.

The bone of a tusk brushed her arm.

Her restraints were yanked away.

The boar let out a last huffing grunt, then she could feel the tremors of his stomping lead away from her. Pakunoda’s eyes flew open. She kept still for another minute just to make sure he wasn’t coming back and watched as the monstrous boar examined the young stag’s lifeless body. Snuffling and nudging at the smaller animal with his snout. He let out short, distressed squeaks.

Paku was pulled to her feet by Uvogin. He limped, he held his side and struggled to breathe in a way that could mean a broken rib - but he was miraculously  _ alive _ . They could count their wounds when they had left this cursed forest.

When she threw her partner’s arm around her shoulders, she looked back one last time.

The stag opened his eyes; the broken nub of his antler budded and sprouted green branches. The boar quivered, then his right side went slack and he collapsed.

Paku knew she would never shoot an animal again. Not as long as… _ that _ existed.


	4. Natural Charms

When Leorio woke, there was only half of him. 

His left eye stared at the overgrown ceiling of a not-so-unfamiliar bedroom. 

His left ear heard the clacking of fingers on a keyboard. 

His left hand twitched. 

The desk chair creaked and Kurapika was by his side with a glass of clear yellow liquid, leading a straw to the left corner of Leorio’s mouth. Urging him to drink, to rest. His fingers shook badly.

Leorio gulped down the content of the glass greedily, barely registering the taste of overripe apples and yeast. Cider. 

He drifted into sleep again.

 

Later. His missing side had returned in the shape of a tingling sensation, like a limb that had fallen asleep. It was dusk or dawn and the world existed only in burnt shades of orange, red, sienna.

Efraim guarded his bedside. “How are you feeling?”, he whispered.

“The stag.” Leorio sat up abruptly even though his right side felt like a sherbet that had been dunked in a soft drink.  “He’s hurt. I need to-”

Efraim grabbed him by the shoulders and told him to hush, casting a nervous glance to his feet where Kurapika lay, cocooned in a sleeping bag. Only his head peeked out, his golden hair fell onto the pillow in a tangle. A matted streak had been tucked around the soft shell of his ear. Leorio thought he had done a good job at getting over his initial crush but at the sight he was overcome once again with fondness as warm and tingly as mulled wine. He made a mental note to lower his voice.

“The stag is fine, Leorio,” Efraim reassured. “I’m not sure what you saw or what business you had in the woods, but he led us to you. I have to say, you gave us quite the scare. I also called the clinic to tell your boss you caught a fever and won’t be able to show up at work for a few days, so you can rest.”

“You lied to my boss?”

“It’s not a lie if you’re really sick, my boy. Just... a misdiagnosis. If you’re an honest fella, and I shall think that you are, she will have no reason to think you’re faking. So enjoy your long weekend and focus on getting better. We’ll be there for you if you need something.”

Leorio swallowed. There was not an aspect of this that he enjoyed - not the lying, not that he had to depend on these kind people’s hospitality again, but the decision had already been made for him and now the best thing he could do was to accept it with gratitude.  _ Besides _ , he figured as he tried to lean back and prop himself on his bad arm, only to notice it giving way underneath him and having him fall back onto the mattress harder than intended,  _ it’s not like I’m going to be very useful like that, to anyone _ .

Embarrassed and unwilling to meet Efraim Kurta’s eyes, he said his thanks.

 

Efraim slipped out of his son's room quietly and went to check on his  _ other _ son and his  _ other _ guest which were residing in the living room. He found Gon curled up behind the sofa, tail behind his legs.

“He’s been like this since I gave him the first shot. The tetanus one was way overdue by the way,” Cheadle said as she brought the contents of her medical kit in order. 

“He hates needles,” Efraim confirmed. He sat down on the couch and patted the seat next to him invitingly. Gon turned his snout away from him, laying  his ears flat against his head. Well. That stung a little bit, but Efraim could not claim he didn’t deserve it; after all he had let Gon believe that Dr. Yorkshire’s visit was only for Leorio’s sake. If he thought about it, he had done an awful lot of lying lately. Sadly, it didn’t look like that would change soon.

Cheadle let her briefcase snap close and pulled apart her hair bun. “How was he?”, she inquired rather businesslike, as if they were dealing with just any patient.

“Fine, as far as I could tell. He was alert, his eyes were focused and he had no trouble speaking.”

“And you’re sure he showed signs of a stroke when you found him?”

“I wouldn’t have called you if it hadn’t been serious. You should have seen his face.”  _ And you should have seen Kurapika’s face, _ he wanted to add. He would never forget the way his son had come running toward him, wearing his worry and fear and confusion for everyone to see, gasping for air, screaming for help. He would never forget how half of Leorio’s features seemed to have melted and migrated downwards as a result of the paralysis. None of that was supposed to happen.

“I’m just asking because that recovery rate is absurd even for-” She made a circling motion with her hand as she searched for a term that she was comfortable with. She didn’t find any.

“He’s not like Gon or Killua,” said Efraim. “He’s not even like Kurapika. I have never seen someone like him. Also... there’s something else you must watch out for because it might resurface soon.”

Cheadle exhaled through her nose and put her arms akimbo; this was her fighting stance, for weathering arguments with the stubborn and the ignorant. “If you tell me that he has become a threat to himself and my patients, I will walk into the forest and punch your wife in the face until she fixes that poor boy, because I swear, he deserved better than to get involved with her.”

Efraim ran his tongue over his dry lips. He felt like Cheadle was being unfair to Sylvia, but this woman had grown up fearing the ‘demons’ of the woods and some of them  _ were _ to fear. The dryad that had ruled the forests of her home had been mad, and hungry for blood, out of touch with the times, but he had been an exception. Not even Sylvia dared to say his name. Still. Efraim knew that he could not blame Cheadle for looking at his wife and considering what she might turn into. “He’s not a threat. Quite the opposite. That injury he got… it wasn’t his own.”

“Pardon?”

“He wasn’t hurt, at first. But someone else was and he healed them by taking their wounds. I’m not sure if it happened consciously or not and it doesn’t seem like Leorio remembers, but if you could make sure he stays away from the patients who-”

“Shouldn’t you tell  _ him _ and not me?”

Efraim fell silent.

“I see. So your secrets are more important to you than his safety.”

“That’s not it.”

“You tell yourself that, let’s see how well you fare with that when he eventually finds out,” she snapped, and prepare to leave. Efraim made no motion to stop her, nor did he try to convince her. He was an envoy, not a missionary; it was not his job to spread the good word of the forest sprites’ kindness and wonders. 

After Cheadle had slammed the door behind her, Gon rested his head on the couch’s armrest and yipped in a concerned manner. Efraim scratched him behind the ears and tried for a cheerful smile. “Well, let’s see it that way, I don’t think she’s going to come back too soon to give you more shots, isn’t that great?”

Gon whined.

“Don’t worry, she’s just upset because she cares about Leorio. She’ll keep an eye on him, no matter what.”

Gon discarded his animal skin and tilted his head, imploring. “She has a point. It’s not fair of us not to tell him what’s going on. He saved Kurapika’s life.”

“And I owe him a lot for this, don’t you think I’ll forget. But if he wants answers, he can turn to Sylvia at any time.” Efraim ruffled Gon’s hair. He knew he was not making the right decision; the nature of humans and sprites was too complicated for such simple standards. When in doubt, he tried to do what was best for Kurapika - and since his son had not given up on pretending to be human in front of Leorio, Efraim would not infer with that.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Leorio stayed for three nights and three days, much to Kurapika’s secret delight. 

He insisted on helping with the farm work, to repay the Kurta’s hospitality and their ridiculous habit of stuffing him with food. Not that he minded: he would have gladly died fat and happy if it meant eating Kurapika’s pastries for the rest of his life. His favorites were the strudels: delicious puff pastry filled with poppy seed cream or hot apple and plum filling with a pinch of cinnamon, served with a generous helping of custard or ice cream. The crispness of the crust, combined with the stickiness of the hot filling that met the cold, melting ice cream - he would have died for this experience. Hell, he would have  _ paid _ for it. It was so good that for once he managed to really savour the taste instead of just stuffing his face with it.

He was torn between convincing Kurapika to open a café and keeping the knowledge of this flavor selfishly to himself.

His body recovered quickly, but with relapses: sometimes his hand twitched involuntarily or he fell because he lost the feeling in his leg, so Efraim made sure to give him harmless tasks, like clearing away branches and leaves after cutting the trees and bushes, or watering the plants in the greenhouse. On his last afternoon, he even showed Leorio how to pollinate the tomato and cucumber plants by hand, which was tedious work, but necessary. Although the greenhouse provided protection from the weather and a more stable temperature, bees rarely flew into it and when they did, they got trapped and died. So, hand-pollination it was. Usually that task fell to Kurapika because he was most skilled at it, but the year was still young and the plants still had plenty of time to grow and produce new flowers.

It took them all morning.

After that they had lunch and decided to take a break from the farm work for a few hours, to rest their sore eyes and backs. Efraim retreated to the bedroom to take a well-deserved nap but not without letting Gon out to play, so it was just Leorio and Kurapika in the kitchen. Leorio wouldn’t have minded to stretch out on the couch and squeeze in a little nap himself, but if he had the choice between getting rest and watching the way Kurapika’s shoulders rolled when he was kneading dough, he knew what he’d choose. Kurapika had changed his usual oversized sweaters for an ink blue t-shirt, in order to avoid flour-stained sleeves. It also showed off his lean arm muscles just nicely; the way they flexed made Leorio want to whistle. But he valued his life, so he resorted to leaning against the counter and watching how Kurapika’s fingers played with pressure, switching from determined to gentle, almost sensual kneading. Leorio had no doubt that Kurapika’s nimble hands could raise more than just dough.

Every now and then he peeked out of the kitchen window, to appear less like he was blatantly staring. And when he wasn’t too distracted, he could even keep up a conversation.

“I don’t recall you having that many trees when I was here in winter.”

Kurapika stopped to stretch his back and rub the sweat off his forehead with his wrist. “Huh,” he said, as if he had just noticed himself.

“Are those all fruit trees?”

“Most of them, yes.”

“Must’ve been quite exhausting to plant them all. Not to mention expensive. Where did you even get trees of that size?”

Kurapika shot him a dubious look. “You must be joking.”

“Uhhhh,” Leorio replied, thinking hard about what about his statement had been joke-worthy. “About what?”

Kurapika rolled his eyes and continued kneading. “If you had bothered to stop by every once in awhile you would have seen that they grew all by themselves. The town is not the only place where the boar has spread his seeds.” He raised the dough, turned it over and slapped it back onto the counter. “And so close to the woods, everything grows faster.”

Leorio sputtered. “You- these came from the woods and you just let them  _ grow _ ? Why didn’t you pull them out?”

A shrug. “Why waste a gift?”

Leorio bowed down and asked in a hushed tone: “Is that  _ safe _ ? I mean, last time you made this huge fuss about things that come from the woods and now you actually consider eating whatever’s growing on these mystery trees? What if it’s poisonous?”

“It’s not.” Kurapika flashed him a smile, content and maybe a little smug. “The wood has always provided for us. It would never cause us harm. But it doesn’t always attract good things. Dad used to grow wheat before we figured out that the… the  _ visitors _ love hiding in the fields. And they spoil the crops. So we switched to canola and lavender and planted sage all around the house. It got better and after a while they made themselves scarce. Most days, the worst pest we have to deal with are the bugs. You mustn’t make the mistake to wear yellow near a canola field.”

“Your dad made a pact with the woods, didn’t he?” The words rolled off Leorio’s tongue the second he thought of it.

“That’s an awfully personal question, Leorio.”

He was tempted to apologize and leave it at that, but he  _ had _ to know. It seemed that Kurapika and his father had a much more harmonious relationship with the woods, that they knew so much more about it while all that Leorio had been given was arbitrary amnesia and cryptic remarks from a bird. But before he could dig deeper, Kurapika said: “Talking about personal questions, you do know I gave you my number for a reason, don’t you?”

Leorio’s stomach plummeted deep, at least down to his knees.  _ Shit. _ “I meant to call, really, I’ve just been super busy and-” He had had no idea what to say. Because it sounded like an empty excuse and really, he  _ had _ been busy but he’d also been second-guessing an awful lot. Because at first he hadn’t been sure if giving his number had really meant that Kurapika was hitting on him and if so where was this going to  _ lead, _ and was it smart to hook up with a boy that he barely knew when he had just gotten himself into a real supernatural mess - before Leorio knew it, he had procrastinated the call too long to not make it awkward, regardless what he did.

“You don’t need to explain yourself,” Kurapika interjected into the silence of Leorio’s almost tangible thinking. “I just wanted to make sure my intentions were clear.” Then, almost as an afterthought he added: “My father says I can come off as pretty abrasive.”

Leorio erupted with laughter. “Yeah, you’re-”

Kurapika’s head jerked up and he glared at Leorio with deeply knitted eyebrows and the most adorable pout and god, how Leorio would have loved to take a picture of his stupidly offended expression. “You’re quite something,” he finished, then chuckled as Kurapika’s frown only deepened. “Don’t look at me like that, you waved a knife in my face! If that’s how you treat a guy you like, I’d hate to find out what you’d do to your boyfriend.”

“Oh, I’ll show you!” Kurapika promised sprinkled flour in his direction and Leorio jumped a few steps back, still chuckling. 

“Go ahead, I’m waiting.”

He felt…  _ elated _ . Giddiness bubbled through his veins until his head was light as a balloon. They were actually flirting, weren’t they? In an odd, bumbling sort of way. And, lord help him, Kurapika was actually  _ blushing _ in a shade of pink that Leorio promptly considered his new favorite color.

“Soooo?” he cooed, pushing his luck a little further… and choked on his mirth when Kurapika grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him close. Their feet bumped together and Leorio’s heart did a little jig. He was close enough to count the faint freckles on Kurapika’s nose or his shimmering lashes.

“You’re getting flour on my shirt,” Leorio informed with a heavy tongue, his throat parched, his voice rasping.

“Actually, it’s my shirt.”

“It’s way too big to fit you.”

Kurapika brought a hand up to his neck, warm and dry. The grain of the flour dust prickled against Leorio’s skin. “I sleep in it.”

Leorio had no time to process this mental image because Kurapika rose to his tiptoes and all but caught him in a kiss.  _ ‘Oh shit’ _ , he thought once, but with a lot of emotion. First, there was nothing but the press of Kurapika’s lips and the tremble of his fingers against Leorio’s pulse. Then Kurapika relaxed and his mouth shifted slightly, quieting the constant hum of Leorio’s thoughts with the heat of his palm coming to rest against his jawline, his thumb stroking a stubbly cheek.

Despite his quick advance, Kurapika was uncharacteristically shy. Leorio let him set the pace; he matched the slow caress of his lips, he pulled Kurapika in close, one hand steady on his hip, the other safe against the small of his back. And despite the slow sweetness Kurapika refused to retreat: Leorio never got more than a hiccups’ worth of breath in between kisses until his lungs ached as much as his awkwardly craned neck and he had to tell him to stop, stop,  _ you are going to kill me _ . But he laughed all the same and rubbed his nose against Kurapika’s. “So,” he concluded, breathing heavily. Wispy lashes tickled his cheek. “Wanna know how  _ I _ treat a boy I’m interested in?”

Kurapika laughed. “Oh, I already know.” Impossible creature that he was, he didn’t sound remotely out of breath. 

“You do?”

“I saw you a couple of times. You’re not as inconspicuous as you think you are, bringing them into the woods.”

Because he was still fuzzy with the aftershock of the kiss, it took Leorio a full second to realize what Kurapika had said. It took him another to remember how the trips to his secret making out spot hadn’t always ended as sweetly as the moment he just shared; quite often he had walked home with his shirt rumpled and hastily buttoned up the wrong way or grass stains on his knees. And while there was no shame in having some intimate fun, the idea that he had been seen-

_ ‘Oh my god.’ _

“Sure it was me and not some other strapping young man, you saw? I have a very nondescript face,” he claimed, making it sound like a brag while hoping that Kurapika had not seen his face at all. 

“I would recognize your ridiculous monkey ears everywhere,” Kurapika said softly and the hand that had cupped Leorio’s cheek traveled upwards; a finger traced the curve of said monkey ear.

“Ridiculous?”

“Yes, in the best way. I’d almost consider them your most charming feature, in fact...” Kurapika’s contempt smile faltered. “I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?”

He hadn’t. It was just that Leorio considered that their first not-quite-meeting must have been years ago, before he moved out of his childhood home to escape his stepfather’s bigoted rantings, before he even turned eighteen and just how many years younger than him could Kurapika be? How old had Kurapika been when he had stumbled upon something he definitely wasn’t meant to see?

“Just what exactly did you see me do?”

“Kissing that other boy like you meant to drain his life out of him. I- I didn’t stay to  _ watch _ if that’s what you think.”

“Well,  _ that’s _ a relief,” Leorio growled, more sarcastic than he had intended.

Kurapika smoothed his hands over Leorio’s shirt and chuckled. “I’m sure you were a perfect gentleman. On second thought, maybe I could use a little demonstration, although it would be best if we continued this... somewhere a little more private.”

Leorio’s heart started beating wildly in his chest. If that wasn’t an invitation, he didn’t know what was. “I’d like that. What about your baki- what the fuck.” Leorio’s eyes had fallen upon the discarded lump of bread dough which had grown as large as a  _ pumpkin _ . Kurapika turned his head quick as a whip and joined in on the cursing. He struggled out of Leorio’s embrace and rushed to the dough, pressed down on the lump with his entire weight to deflate it. He started to fold and knead but the volume decreased only ever so slightly and Leorio watched with unease, half expecting the mass to swallow Kurapika. “Is there any way I can help you?”

“No, i’ll deal with that, it’s fine,” Kurapika assured and waved him away.

“Oh. Okay.”

He stopped fighting with the dough to grant Leorio a warm smile and promised to be in his room in ten minutes, if Leorio would wait for him.

 

Ten minutes of waiting stretched into thirteen minutes which Leorio spent with intermittent pacing and nervously touching every item in Kurapika’s room, turning it in his hands shortly and then putting it back a little guiltily. He didn’t even know why - he had slept in this room for the past few nights, if there was anything he wasn’t meant to see it would have been removed by now. As long as he didn’t break anything - and at that thought he shoved his hands under his armpits where they could do no harm.

He was not risking fucking this up, no sir.

When Kurapika finally showed up, he was flushed and sweaty in the prettiest way. He had to have taken off his apron in a hurry because his golden hair was slightly more disheveled than Leorio remembered and god, did he want to kiss that boy.

“We have forty minutes until the kitchen timer goes off,” Kurapika whispered and locked the door behind him.

“So… that’s a really nice plant you have growing all over the room”, said Leorio in a polite offer to make conversation and he stood a little taller, a little less defensively. He let his hands fall to his hips and did his best to look like a man who knew what he was talking about. “That’s an orchid, right? I mean, it’s hard to tell if they’re not flowering-”

“It’s a vanilla.” Kurapika rushed to the window and closed the curtains, shutting out some of the late spring brightness. “Which is in fact an orchid.”

“Wow. I hadn’t pegged you a vanilla kind of guy.”

Kurapika’s dark eyes fixed on Leorio with the intensity of a hunter that had spied his prey. “As opposed to what?”

He felt put on the spot. Exposed. This had been such a bad thing to say but as always, he hadn’t realized until he actually said it. Leorio shrugged. “Chocolate? Did you know you can really tell a lot about the person based on what ice cream flavor they like best?”

“I don’t like ice cream,” Kurapika said.

“Ah,” Leorio said. Way to kill a conversation. “Well, uh, how did your battle with the dough go? That is some really potent yeast you have here.”

Kurapika stared at him incredulously. “Leorio, do you really want to talk about yeast now?”

No. In fact, yeast was the last thing he wanted to talk about - he wanted to tell Kurapika that he was stunning and talented and that he had quite liked kissing him, without coming off weird and Leorio was still grappling for words when Kurapika stepped up to him and pulled him close by the waistbands of his jeans. Leorio stumbled and held onto Kurapika’s shoulders for support.

“You don’t want to talk at all do you?”, he concluded.

“Not necessarily.”

And just like that they were kissing again, but this time Leorio was prepared and Kurapika was... hungry. He pressed himself flush against Leorio as his lips captured him, imploring, demanding Leorio’s full attention.

He must have put on some perfume, because a sweet floral scent filled Leorio’s nose - but no sweeter than the little gasps that Kurapika let out in between their mingling breaths. The orchid leaves seemed to rustle softly overhead, and perhaps it was just the noise of Leorio’s own blood rushing in his ears, how could he be sure, how could he put together a single coherent thought when Kurapika leaned heavily against him, when the tip of Kurapika’s tongue brushed against his lips? Leorio welcomed it, he met it for a slow dance with his own tongue, when a shudder ran through him and traveled low, gravitating towards a rather sensitive part of his body that began to stir and rise with new purpose.

A change went through Kurapika as well. He released his grip on Leorio’s shirt and started to pry open the buttons, one by one.

“Should we-”, Leorio interrupted, but Kurapika used the break to fall back on his heels and pepper little nibbling kisses all across Leorio’s neck. Leorio’s knees grew weak. He groaned, his pants grew uncomfortable. “ _ God _ . You really wanna?”

“You don’t?”

He did. The physical proof was pressed tightly against Kurapika’s navel, so he couldn’t claim otherwise, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a few qualms. “We only just met.”

“Was that ever an issue with the other boys?”, Kurapika asked. He leaned back, better to fumble with the lowest buttons.

“No, but I knew I wouldn’t get to see them again.”

That put a damper to Kurapika’s enthusiasm. “What?”

Leorio swallowed. He wondered how to explain this without sounding like an asshole, without getting judged for it. “I never brought the same boy twice. It’s not like we could meet openly and half of them wouldn’t even admit to not being straight, not that I blame them. Some of them treated me like shit afterwards, just to cast off suspicions, which I  _ do _ blame them for. But.” He hesitated. Kurapika’s face was drawn with genuine confusion. “What I’m trying to say is I could just walk away from whatever happened in the woods because it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. I’m… not going to do that with you. I like you. Enough to stick around and see where it goes. I promise. You don’t have to rush into this.”

“So... you’d rather want me to stop?” Kurapika concluded, choosing his words with slow care.

“Only if you’re not sure.”

“I am. But it appears that you are the one who’s uncomfortable.”

“What? No, I’m- well, I’m always a little uncomfortable, that’s just how I roll,” Leorio said and chuckled awkwardly. “It’s not  _ you _ .”

“I see,” Kurapika said and his eyes grew softer. He lowered his glance and fiddled with Leorio’s shirttails. “Then let’s agree to keep our hands and lips above waistline for now. How does that sound to you?”

Relief flooded his veins, relief he hadn’t known he needed until now. Leorio stared at the top of Kurapika’s head and knew with a strange certainty that he could fall in love with this boy. Someday. “Sounds great, actually.”

“Good,” said Kurapika. “Now, where were we?” Gently, he pulled the shirt off Leorio’s left shoulder and laid a hand on his chest, right over his fast beating heart - and withdrew it as quick as if he had been burned. Leorio’s skin started to tingle immediately. When he scratched, grass broke under his fingers. “How-” He stared down at himself and truly, there was a patch of grass growing on his chest, in the shape of a handprint. He stared. He blinked.

He felt the overwhelming urge to sit down, which he did at the edge of Kurapika’s bed. 

“Leorio-”, Kurapika called out, sounding slightly alarmed.

This was how it ended, wasn’t it? The wood had reached out and started to change him and he could kiss goodbye to any hopes for being just a regular guy to Kurapika, because now there was no denying that he was a freak. Was it because of something he had done? Or something he hadn’t done? Had the Will come to the conclusion that he couldn’t serve her purpose sufficiently and this was his punishment? Why couldn’t they warn him before they worked their strange magic on him? And why couldn’t he have just one moment of being perfectly normal in his goddamn life?

“Does it hurt?”, Kurapika asked.

Leorio shook his head to say no, but pain or no pain wasn’t the problem. He buried his face in his hands. “I’m just so tired of things just...  _ happening _ to me. And I’m tired of the woods and her goddamn mysteries and the secrets and the memory gaps and now I’m turning into a garden or compost or some shit and no one bothers to stop by and  _ explain- _ ”

“Leorio, look at me,” Kurapika urged. The mattress tilted slightly as he sat down close enough for their legs to touch and rested his hand on Leorio’s knee. “That wasn’t the wood’s doing. It’s  _ me _ . It’s a special gift I have: I can make plants grow. That was why the dough was acting crazy, I got a little too excited when you kissed me.”

Leorio raised his head slowly. “Please tell me that’s not a bad joke.”

Kurapika looked as somber and serious as was humanly possible. “Listen, all these new trees on our farm, even the wood couldn’t make them grow that fast, not with the most fertile soil in the world. She gave us the seedlings, but I grew them to that height. Let me show you something.” And with that, he took his hand off Leorio’s knee and offered it. After a moment of incredulous hesitation, Leorio took it.

Again, his skin tingled as fresh greens sprouted from it. Vines bound their intertwined fingers. Soon they bore tiny flowers.

Leorio swallowed and tried to make sense of this. “But this means I am a plant.”

“No. You must have had seeds or pollen on you, but- I don’t think you’re wholly human either. Even if you were covered from head to toe in seeds, without soil I could not make them sprout. Which means that you must be a pygmy, a gnome. An earth sprite.”

Leorio laughed dryly, without any humor. “I don’t wanna call you a liar but I’m way too big for a gnome, don’t you think. Also, where would be the point in making me one, what do they even do?”

“They’re resilient, for one thing, perhaps that’s why you heal so quick. Look, you’re already recovering-” With his free hand, Kurapika pointed at his Leorio’s chest. The patch of grass had turned yellow and was starting to dry up. “And you’re uncomfortable among people, aren’t you? You feel safer surrounded by bricks or concrete. It’s the same for me, except I need to be around greens.”

“That’s called social anxiety, Pika,” Leorio disagreed. He was starting to feel quite drained. “It’s not magic.”

“I assume you’re also incredibly afraid of heights. How well do you swim? Can you swim at all or do you sink like a stone?”

Again, he hesitated, because Kurapika was right about all of these things. “But I’ve always been like that, before I ever set foot into the woods.”

“Exactly.”

“No.  _ No. _ My mom was human. My dad too. I’m not- I can’t be some sort of mystical creature that’s just absurd.”

Kurapika would not be convinced. “But you’ve said it yourself: the wood has not caused this, so you must have always had it in you. And that means there’s probably more, little things that always made you feel like you were a little weird, like you didn’t belong but that are perfectly normal for a child of the earth.”

“Okay, assuming you were right - and I’m not saying I believe you just yet - shouldn’t I have noticed it sooner?”

Kurapika frowned. His gaze fell to their tightly intertwined fingers. “I admit, I have never met a sprite who didn’t know what they were. But She will know. You must go and ask the Will of the woods.”

“What if I can’t?”

“What do you mean?”

Discomfort crawled over his skin like a pesky bug and Leorio rolled his hunched shoulders, trying to shake the feeling that he wasn’t meant to be here, wasn’t meant to have this conversation. It was absurd, that he could just talk about sprites and magic and have someone not only believe him, but offer advice as well. And yet, some things were hard to admit.  _ ‘I am afraid,’ _ he wanted to say.  _ ‘I don’t know what’s becoming of me.’ _

What he said out loud was: “The last few times I went into the woods, I fell unconscious and had a gaping hole in my memory. What if that happens again? Let’s assume I get there and ask my question, what good is it if I cannot remember the answer?”

Kurapika’s frown carved deeper. “That’s… odd. Still, if you don’t want to go near her, you can always turn to an envoy to ask on your behalf. Actually, you should tell them about your memory loss, too.”

Leorio huffed. “Who? The crow that keeps making fun of me? The stag who refuses to talk to me? I have yet to see that any of them gives a shit.”

Kurapika flinched and Leorio wondered if he had squeezed his hand too hard.

“I give a shit about you,” he said, uncharacteristically quiet.

“Glad to hear that.”

“Leorio, do you remember the first time you came here? Before you collapsed on our porch?”

“I don’t. I think I told you that, didn’t I? I made up some bullshit excuse about why I couldn’t remember, but that night is really just blank in my head.”

Kurapika casted his eyes to the ground. He breathed in. He breathed out. Leorio watched the rise and fall of his shoulders and he could tell by the way his muscles wound with tension that he was getting angry.

“This is not right,” he said, his words sharp, his eyes blazing with defiance. “Whatever her plans for you, she would not take your memory. You must tell her about this, because I don’t think this was meant to happen.”

“God, I wish I had your certainty.”

“You do,” Kurapika assured, except it sounded more like the promise of a fight. “Because I will take you. And I will make sure you get your answers.”

 

* * *

 

When the kitchen timer rang, Kurapika asked Leorio to retrieve the bread from the oven while he stepped out onto his father’s land. He wandered between the foreign trees which would soon bear heavy fruit, as if to examine them. When he knew he was too far from the porch to be overheard, he raised his head and cursed up a storm. He wove two of the crow’s names in it, first the human one that the crow had picked for himself, then the one that his mother had given him in the tongue of the forest.

Kurapika closed his eyes and let the wind caress his skin, like he had done many a day in his youth, and more recent than he wanted to admit. There was something to be said about releasing your anger into the world and making it known, about letting it rage without hurting anybody; such magic had its own dramatic appeal. He welcomed when the winds picked up the pace and whipped about his frame, stinging his eyes.

Kurapika was not left to his lonely tantrum for long because Gon came running to join him, crossing the distance in long strides. He leapt around Kurapika in a circle of excitement and stopped only to reply to the gale’s ghostly howls with his own.

The weight of a jacket lowered on Kurapika’s shoulders. He slipped into the sleeves of Leorio’s parka, not bothering to point out that he had plenty of jackets on his own, and how easy it would have been to fetch one of them. He liked the way how he disappeared inside the fabric, how the sleeves nearly swallowed his arms until only his fingertips poked out and most of all he liked that it was Leorio’s and that he was allowed to hog it.

“Your dad says we have to be back before nightfall,” Leorio said, “I promised him we would, but...”

“We’ll be. This is not going to take long and if Gon is coming with us, we can afford to be a few minutes late. Are you ready?”

“Hell no.” Leorio scoffed, then chuckled and took Kurapika’s hand anyway.


	5. Unearthing

“All sprites have two things in common: they are born from an element and they are two-skinned, which means they have two appearances, one that is human and one that is not. Water sprites are a bit of an exception because their appearance lies on a spectrum through which they can shift fluidly. They can grow gills or fins or a tail if they desire, but most of them have a look they prefer.

“As for the sylph - the sprites of the air, the forest people - they undergo a complete transformation. Most of them appear as animals, others like the Will of the woods appear as plants. She’s a dryad and incredibly old, so she has seen a lot of sprites being born and wither away. If there’s one person who knows what is wrong with you, it’s her.”

“But I’m not an air sprite, or any sprite at all, I’m telling you” Leorio remarked with no small amount of stubbornness. Kurapika wasn’t surprised that he was still struggling to accept. And maybe Leorio had every right to gripe; despite all the knowledge he was offered, he had yet to be shown evidence for its truth.

“No, but even you have another form. I’ve seen you turn back, Leorio. The night when you first came to us. You… you’ve been tossing and turning around on the fields as if you were in pain and then you shrank back into your human skin and you looked right at me, without really seeing me. That’s why I had to ask you if you remembered, because you came to me all the same.”

Kurapika felt a pull on his hand when Leorio stopped, so he waited and turned.

“You said it was that huge boar who ruined your fields.” Even as Leorio spoke, his features slipped into confusion and the lines on his forehead etched deeper when that confusion bloomed into realization.

“You mean the boar that’s been trampling all over your town? The one that first showed up the very night you swore to serve the woods? Did it never occur to you that this was an awfully strange coincidence?”

“No,” Leorio said, but without real conviction. One could almost see his denial crumble away as his glance drifted, and he started to think about it. “So that’s why he called me a pig.”

“Who called you a pig?”, Kurapika demanded to know, immediately. He had a strong hunch, though.

“That crow… kid.”

He sneered. “Of course. Corvids. No manners at all. Next time he tries to insult you, call him a birdbrain. He hates that.”

Gon’s head perked up. He whined.

“I don’t care,” Kurapika replied.

Leorio tripped and nearly fell. “Wait. Is your wolf…  a person too?”

“He’s… sort of my brother. Gon! Stop playing around and introduce yourself to Leorio properly.”

The wolf dashed through the underbrush with a predator’s terrifying speed and leapt high - and shifted mid-leap. 

Strong arms reached for a branch to swing out the momentum. Gon let himself fall and landed with a boy’s proud grin. “Hi.”

Leorio’s grip around Kurapika’s hand grew even tighter. He muttered something inaudible, then cleared his throat and tried again: “Yeah, I can really see the family resemblance.”

“Really?”, Gon beamed, confused but delighted. “I thought we look nothing alike.”

“He’s joking, Gon.” Kurapika looked from one to the other. If anything, a resemblance could be found between Leorio and Gon. They appeared to be the same height at first, due to Leorio’s hunched position and the fact that Gon wore his black hair longer and mussed up, so he gained a few millimeters. Gon also arguably took up more space, there was not a part of him that wasn’t broad and packed with muscle; meanwhile Leorio’s shoulders were wide, but narrowed to a more slender torso. 

Impossible to tell if it was Gon’s physique or his display of raw energy, but Leorio seemed quite intimidated.

Gon didn’t appear to notice; he sniffed the air and announced that they should better hurry up because it was going to rain soon. “Also, Killua’s on the way,” he added.

“He’d better be, I called for him.”

“Who’s Killua?”, Leorio wanted to know.

“The insolent crow that you’ve already met.”

“Oh. I see. So, uh, just checking, is there  _ any _ animal in this forest that’s actually just an animal?”

“The bugs,” Kurapika offered. “Probably.”

 

Gon took the lead again, humming a cheery tune as he stomped ahead.

Kurapika was grateful for a little bit of privacy. He kept on looking to the side, searching Leorio’s face. “Are you alright? I can understand if this is all a bit much, but please warn me if you’re going to pass out.”

“No, it’s just-” Leorio bowed down to whisper in Kurapika’s ear. “I gave him belly rubs just a few hours ago, this is so weird.”

Kurapika coughed as the laughter bubbled up in his chest. He tried to fight it - and lost with an undignified snort. Quaking, giggling, he blurted out: “Oh dear, you’re really something else.”

Leorio casted his eyes to the ground and blushed heavily. “No need to make fun of me,” he growled. His skin grew warm, his hands slippery with sweat. 

Kurapika still held tight. “I’m not. If I was, I’d let you know. Come on, you heard Gon, let’s get moving before we get wet.”

 

When the rain started pouring down, Kurapika placed his hand on a trunk in passing and asked the trees to give them shelter, to shift their foliage to a dense roof that would protect them from the weather. With mediocre success; unlike flowers who were always trying to please, who lived to dream and shine, a tree was a creature with very prominent personality. Some were stubborn or uncaring and some just lazy; those did not move at all. Some rustled their leaves for the sake of pretending, but they only spilled more rain on the three young men wandering between them until soon their shoulders and backs were soaked and Kurapika’s hair clung flat and lifeless to his head.

But the closer they got to the sanctuary, the more cooperative and helpful the trees proved until only the howling wind and the sound of heavy pattering rain reminded them that the storm was playing rough above the leafage.

“This is as far as I will take you,” Kurapika announced when he saw the ledge of the crater that marked the center, the heart of the woods. The sanctuary. “You’re going to want a bit of privacy for the talk you’re about to have, trust me. But we’re going to stay close, so just shout if you need us.”

“Wait! What if I… change and turn into an animal again?”

“You won’t,” he promised.

Leorio was not satisfied with that. “Okay, but what if I  _ do _ ?”

“Then it’s going to be even easier to find you,” Gon offered, grinning.

“I’m serious.”

“So was he. Gon should be able to keep up with your pace, so we will get to you before you leave the woods - but you’re not going to turn because there is no need to right now. Neither the woods nor its creatures are in danger. You’ll be just  _ fine _ , so stop stressing. Now go.”

Leorio took a few hesitant steps ahead, struggling to untangle his hand from Kurapika’s although the tendrils that had grown over them already turned brown and limp. He opened his mouth to say something, then shot a glance to Gon and stopped himself. Leorio wrung his hands, rubbing wilted flowers off his skin.

“Well, see you in a few minutes then, I guess,” he said and grimaced as if he had bitten on something sour. He made his descent as if advancing a great and terrible beast: shoulders raised and head ducked low. Muttering under his breath.

Gon snickered.

“What is he saying?”, Kurapika whispered. 

Gon grinned from ear to ear, but shook his head. His hearing was almost as sharp as his nose, so he could not help overhearing things that weren’t meant for him, but most of the time he was too decent a boy to gossip about it. And sometimes he refused to tell Kurapika because he knew that Kurapika hated not knowing things. “Didn’t you forget to tell him something important?”, he asked instead, effectively derailing the subject.

“I didn’t forget,” Kurapika replied brusquely and turned on his heel, stomping away as if he could escape the unpleasant subject that way. Unfortunately, Gon with his unfairly long legs had no trouble keeping up with his pace. “But isn’t it better if you tell him now before he finds out anyway?”

Kurapika bristled up like an angry hedgehog. “Gon, if there’s one thing I’m certain of is that he has a remarkable talent for not seeing what he doesn’t want to see. And I’m fine with that, so can we leave it at that?”

“But-”

“He still thinks of himself as human,” said Kurapika, “He still freaks out about things that are  _ not _ . He did a really poor job of hiding how terrified he has become of this place… or rather what he thinks it does to him. So no, I’m not interested in him knowing what a part I play in all of this.”

“Instead you drag us all out here so that we can catch a cold,” Killua jeered from above. He was horribly predictable in his dramatic entrances: he liked to settle up on a branch and waited, waited for the perfect moment to disrupt a conversation. He loved to leave you guessing how much he had already heard. Kurapika considered this sort of behaviour pretentious and undignified. The work of a cheap jester.

Gon simply didn’t care because it didn’t work on him - Killua hadn’t managed to sneak up on him, ever.

“Come down here if you expect me to talk to you eye to eye,” Kurapika offered nonchalantly. 

“Wouldn’t you have to grow a decent amount for us to be eye to eye?” 

Kurapika stopped and stomped down his foot - immediately, the nearest trees shook out its branches and heavy droplets fell upon the ground. Killua squawked and fell, and turned into a crow midair. He landed on Gon’s shoulder with his feathers and ego ruffled thoroughly.

Kurapika turned on him, furious as a viper. “I don’t think you have any reason to be cocky, my friend. Tell me, how is it possible that Leorio didn’t know that he was the boar? It was your job to lead him and yet all I hear is that you have been anything but helpful.”

“Oh, come on,” Killua complained. “He knew. He just didn’t want it to be true.”

“No, Killua, he _ literally _ did not know.”

“Excuse me? How can you miss that you’re turning into a giant pig? Like, he must have noticed that he looked different, no one is  _ that _ stupid. Not even him.”

“It seems that he does not remember any of the times he turned. He thought he was human.”

“Human? That guy?” Killua sneered. He spread his wings and hopped off Gon’s shoulder, then turned into his human shape, better to stride demonstratively. “Have you considered yet that he’s lying? I mean, he recognized the fish woman when she tried to steal him-”

“Siberia did  _ what _ ?”, Kurapika hissed. “Why is this the first I ever hear of this?”

This time, Killua had the decency of looking guilty. He stopped and shrugged. “Well, I thought it didn't matter because nothing really happened. Point is, she didn’t see it through because he broke her spell. How would he know how to do that if he didn’t knew a thing about sprites? And just a few days ago he read the roots, so someone must’ve instructed him pretty well. _ I _ can’t even do that.”

Kurapika considered this. Perhaps one of Leorio’s parents - the gnome one - had taught him a thing or two without revealing their true nature. Every child grew up with fairy tales, did they not? 

He rubbed his temple.

But Killua was not yet done defending himself. He crossed his arms before his chest and straightened his back. He held his head up high as he said: “Besides, he’s been staying on your farm that first night, hasn’t he? That would have been plenty of time to welcome him to the court, explain him his duties and answer any questions he might have had, as would have been  _ your duty _ as his liege, but no, you were probably too busy trying to get into his pants.”

Gon’s arms were around his chest before Kurapika could launch himself at the disgusting little loudmouth of a crow and smack him bloody. He struggled; his legs kicked uselessly as he was lifted off the ground so he could not call upon his own or his mother’s magic. Not that he needed either to strangle Killua. “Careful, little bird, before I strip you off your plumage and send you back to the wasteland you came from.”

“Kurapika, no!”, Gon whispered.

But Kurapika’s anger roared even wilder because he had been shamed. “How dare you lecture me about duty! You, of all creatures under the sun! Before we took you in you knew only how to kill and destroy and in all these years you still haven’t learned an ounce of kindness. You’re not worthy of living among humans, you’re no better than a huckop.”

Gon gasped and even Kurapika tasted the bitter gall of his insult the second it had left his tongue. Only Killua seemed barely fazed; his eyes widened to a comically perplexed expression, and he made a little ‘ouf’ noise, as if someone had knocked the wind out of him. “Geez, what are you getting so worked up for? I was just  _ joking _ , it’s not like anyone got hurt. Well.” Killua shrugged again. “Not permanently.”

Kurapika’s stomach turned with disgust. He stopped kicking. His limbs started to tremble as he remembered the sharp jab of pain piercing his head and then not feeling anything at all as half of his body seemed to diffuse into nothingness. It had been terrifying for as long as it lasted, but it had been even worse to see his pain mirrored in Leorio’s sunken-in face and to know that he paid the price for Kurapika’s carelessness. “Just because he heals quicker than any of us doesn’t mean it’s okay to put him in danger.”

“But that’s essentially what he was made for, isn’t it?”, Killua asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“Changeling magic. They’re like… some sort of living crash test dummies, designed to take the blow that was meant for someone else. ”

“He’s a changeling?” Gon asked. “A real one? Are you sure?”

Killua snorted indignantly. “Of course I’m sure. Sylvia told me, when she asked me to free him from the Nix’ spell. She said to fetch him before Siberia took him to her lake, because he wouldn’t fare well in the water. Why?”

 

* * *

 

The second the Will of the Woods revealed herself to him, Leorio  _ knew _ and he wondered how he had not seen the resemblance sooner. Perhaps because last time she had been aetherial, radiant, a sun under the stars. Now she was merely glowing, and the sight of her was no longer painful, at least not in a physical sense. But her nose, her cheekbones, the sharp chin… well, Kurapika’s jaw line was a little harsher, his expression a lot more glum, but he was in many ways a spitting image of his mother.

It all made perfect, dizzying sense. 

After he met Kurapika, the stag had stopped showing itself. And while there could have been plenty of reasons for that at the time, Leorio also had to think of how flowers bloomed under Kurapika’s touch, just like they did in the footsteps of a certain magical creature that roamed these woods. He had to think of Kurapika insisting that he had seen Leorio making out with boys and remembered that the first time he spotted a golden deer he had been doing just that.

He filled his lungs with air until his chest would rise no more and breathed out slowly, trying to steady himself as his head spun with all these realizations that threatened to overwhelm him. He would have to reconsider and reevaluate every single thing that happened to him, not only in the last weeks, but his entire life. He would have to relearn his own past. His head was hurting already.

_ Hello, little one _ , the Will of the woods greeted him and he tried for a cheerful smile in return.  _ I hear that you have questions. _

“I do. A lot, actually. Starting with: do you see and hear everything that goes on in these woods?”

_ Oh dear, of course not,  _ she laughed. Good-humored. Chipper. Leorio wondered how he had ever been afraid of her and her intentions.  _ I can sense whomever walks among my trees and only on the sunniest days, when I rest in my tree, I can listen almost as far as to the border of the forest,  _ she explained.

“So your power really fades in the night?”

_ Naturally. I am still a tree, after all. I do not have the freedom of beasts. _

“Beasts? Like... me?”

She shook her head gently as she treaded over the grass of the meadow, her legs and feet mostly bare. She was wearing a long, flowing tunic out of cornflower blue petals and a silver cardigan so fine, it might have been spun from cobwebs.  _ I mean like Gon and Killua, who are less bound to their element. They can move free as the wind, but they cannot wield its magic like I can. You are no beast. You are a giant, you always have been. _

“I was told I was a gnome,” Leorio muttered.

_ Gnomes, giants, they are the same. Children of the earth come in all sizes and shapes and colors. Most of them are hard and unyielding, but you… you are softer than most. _

He scratched his arm, unsure if that was a good thing or not. “You need to tell me what you did to me. And why I can never remember what I did when I… when I turn into that thing.”

She pondered over that, then, with a wave of her hand, four young trees shot out of the ground at the same spot, growing eagerly skywards, then bending and weaving into the shape of a chair.  _ Sit _ , the Will encouraged him as she grew another seat opposing the first one, following up with a crude table.

“I’m not sure-”

_ My husband says long conversations should always be held at a table. I figured, since you were raised as a human, you might feel more at home that way. _

“Ah,” Leorio said. “Thank you. I’m just not sure if I’m comfortable knowing that I’m sitting on your relatives.”

_ Don’t worry, they are not aware yet, no more than a human infant. Sit, _ she insisted again, and this time he obliged although he pictured himself sitting on four wailing babies. The Will of the woods wrapped her sheer cardigan around her willowy frame and sat down too. Her glow had faded some more and she appeared almost human, if one could ignore the fact that her hair was most definitely not hair and that the freckles on her nose looked like dark pollen. She reached out and took his hand. Leorio flinched in anticipation of some rapid plant growth, but nothing happened. She was just trying to be compassionate.

_ To understand what I did you must know what you are. What you are meant to do. See, I called you a giant because this is the name for all earth sprites that grow above human height. _

“I’m not that much above human height.”

_ I know this, little one. _ She said with a snicker and a friendly pat on his forearm.  _ This is because you are supposed to look like a human. You’re a changeling, Leorio. A replacement child. Changelings are like seeds, in a way. They get planted into a family and they endure, but their true nature remains dormant until they are needed. See, I woke you up.  _ She tilted her head, blinking, searching his face for understanding. She seemed satisfied with what she saw.

_ A changeling is malleable, so they can be adapted to whatever cause they are being put to. I shaped you into a forest dweller, so that you would belong with us. I suppose, I thought this would come to you a lot more naturally, but I’m not surprised to hear that you have no recollection of the time you spent in your new skin. You have spent all your life using your senses in one way, there is a chance your body has not yet learned how to interpret your new way of taking in the world. Had I made you an ape, you would have been less at odds with your new skin. But don’t fret; you will learn. _

She leaned forward and although the voice in his head never decreased in volume, it still gained the hushed quality of a whisper. _ Think of that other form of yours as a babe. They are born blind and thrashing and screaming, and they have yet to figure out how to be a person. They do not think and remember like a person grown. A young sylph, who is born with two skins, will randomly turn from one to the other until they become aware enough to control their appearance; this is because there is a balance to their duality. You, however, are still at odds with the boar. Find your balance and you will be able to remember. _

“But how? And please don’t say ‘yoga’.” Although, if he thought about it, yoga was something he might actually somehow squeeze into his everyday life. And it was a normal thing that normal people did. Nobody in town would bat an eye at it.

Thunder roared overhead. The Will of the woods stood up abruptly, casting her eyes to the sky and then to some point over Leorio’s shoulder.

_ You come to me with a lot of anger, _ she said.  _ What have I done to invoke this? _

Leorio twisted in his seat and peered between the trellis of the young tree stems that made up the backrest. Was he surprised to see Kurapika jog down the slope of the crater in a breakneck speed, wet hair still clinging to his nape, the soggy, borrowed parka flopping loosely around his frame? Not really. But he wondered what had happened that made Kurapika turn on his path, what had caused the tension in his shoulders, his gritted teeth. He was a fight waiting to happen. Leorio grew weary just looking at him.

He wished things could be simpler. Wished he had met Kurapika sooner and while knowing himself - there would have been no need for secrets between them.

Branches reached out to grab Kurapika, but he swatted them away, impatiently. “You knew!”, he complained. “You knew all along and you didn’t tell me.”

_ I have a large well of wisdom to draw upon and only droplets of it have been fed to you, I am afraid you have to be more specific, my child, _ the Will replied, stiff with discomfort and confusion. If it hadn’t been for that, Leorio might have mistaken her answer for sass.

“You knew Leorio wasn’t human. You knew even before you worked your magic on him and yet you never told me?”

_ Ah.  _ She folded her hands together neatly.  _ Indeed. _

“Why?”, Kurapika snarled. He had reached the table now and stood at level with Leorio’s arboreal chair. Leorio shrank back in his seat a little, but he needn’t have worried, because Kurapika pointedly did not look in his direction. Which, all things considered, was kind of unfair. He was the subject of this conversation, was he not? Leorio suddenly wondered how much of Kurapika’s earlier promise had just been for show. He had said he would get Leorio answers. Well, turned out he had been holding back quite a few things himself, things that might have been quite helpful for Leorio to know, but now that someone else did the same thing to him, he threw a hissy fit?

“Maybe,” Leorio suggested, “it’s none of your business? If anyone would have been entitled to that information it’s me, don’t you think?”

“I wasn’t talking to  _ you _ .”

“I’m aware of that.”

Kurapika turned a blotchy shade of red. “Well, I’m sorry, but unlike some people, I cannot pretend that the matters of the woods are none of my business, because they actually  _ are _ .”

“That’s funny because as far as I remember you did a lot of pretending up until now.”

It wasn’t that Leorio wanted to fight. But he wanted to be heard. Everyone seemed to make decisions for him as if he did not have his own voice, as if he was a tool whose best use they had to agree on.

“I’m not going to reward this with an answer.”

“What a real surprise.”

Kurapika huffed and turned to his mother. “You should have told me. It’s my right as his envoy-”

_ But you stepped down as his envoy, so you could meet him as human. _

“Still-”, Kurapika pressed between his teeth. His hands balled up to trembling fists, his breathing grew agitated.

_ Leorio was meant to live a human life, for no other purpose had he been grown. He was not meant to know and neither were you. But then he chose to serve us and I decided that it was safer for him if he could use his full potential. And I… I felt like I could not tell you. You already liked him so much, I didn’t want you to be afraid of him. Or me. _

“Is it such a bad thing to be a changeling?”, Leorio asked. He flinched when Kurapika put a hand on his forearm and focused on him, a spark of pure defiance dancing in his eyes. “It’s not.”

_ Not for us _ , his mother interjected.  _ But it takes quite a toll on the humans who raise them. A young changeling is always hungry. They eat and grow fast and break things because they have no control over their strength or because they’re unhappy. They’re irate creatures because they know they don’t belong in the world they have been brought to. Humans are ill-prepared to raise a child like that. _

Kurapikas’s grip tightened and he made a dismissive noise. “Humans are ill-prepared to raise any child, even their own. It’s not like they can tell the difference, either. Most of the changelings that were described in the Grimm’s lore turned out to be disabled human children. Their parents were so quick to write them off as sprites, just because they turned out different from what they had expected. So their opinion  _ hardly _ matters.”

“Just too bad that not all of us can live like hermits,” Leorio griped. He was aware that Kurapika was trying to be reassuring, he really was. But it was hard not to feel insulted by it. As long as he could remember, he had always been sensitive to other’s opinions of him and how he was perceived; he did not exist separate from his environment after all. He cared about people. He cared about what people  _ thought _ . Just like right now, when he could feel the weight of the Will’s gaze upon him and wondered how she felt about his constant quarreling with her son.

_ There is more to this. The very nature of a changeling terrifies them. I remember when I made you, Efraim was so upset that he did not speak to me for an entire month. _

“You  _ made _ me,” Leorio blurted out, the moment that Kurapika said: “He did _ what _ ?”

The Will looked rather embarrassed about the whole ordeal; patches of pink lichen grew on her cheeks. _ If I explain to you… if I tell you about the day your father brought the woman and her baby into the woods, will you promise to come back here even after you heard me out? You’re not going to run from me, are you? _

Leorio felt the tremor in Kurapika’s warm hands and knew that he was getting overwhelmed by emotion when thistles grew where his palm rested on Leorio’s arm. “I would never,” he said with the cold unyielding finality of a steel blade.

The Will’s eyes flitted to Leorio. An awkward laugh tickled his throat since he could think of no reason as to why she would value his presence at all, yet he heard himself promise: “I’m not going anywhere soon.”

So she grew a chair for her son to sit in and began to talk.

 

* * *

 

Rosa Paladiknights’ piercing wails filled the sanctuary and hurt Sylvia down to her core. She cried, she begged, clutching the motionless body of her infant son to her chest but no matter what she promised to trade away, it did not change the fact that her son was dead.

Leorio Paladiknight had been a quiet, sickly child. Strong enough to be born, but too weak to drink from his mother’s breast. He took the world in one raspy breath at a time, but to his mother, who had struggled through 3 miscarriages, he was miracle all the same.

Perhaps he had been still alive when Efraim led Rosa into the woods and the magic of this place had suffocated the poor, pale baby; perhaps he had perished from the fever that had plagued him before Rosa set foot onto Efraim’s farm. The details did not matter - there was nothing that could be done for the little thing except give him a proper burial, offer him to the soil.

But his mother would hear nothing, see nothing but her own wish: her mind was drowned out by wanting, a neverending stream of  _ I want my son to live I want him to grow up healthy, please, give him strength, I will do anything if you just fill him with life. _

And Sylvia did not understand. All that lived had to die; all that died became nourishment for new life. And yet the woman bent over in agony and fell to her knees as if this one death meant the end of it all. Sylvia had seen grief before, this strange painful longing that a human had to overcome when they let go of one of their loved ones, but never  _ this _ .

Even Efraim’s eyes grew heavy with sorrow and he put one of his rough hands on Rosa’s shoulders. He tried to explain that they were too late, that nothing could be done anymore. 

“Liar!”, she yelled and shook free of his touch, spilling a flood of feral accusations: that he just didn’t want to help her, that he brought her to this place to mock her, that he had never cared for another person’s misery in his life.

Efraim shrank away from her, and Sylvia could see that the words hurt him, despite knowing they were nothing but delusions. Sylvia wanted to press her lover close and seal his ears, hide him away in the cool darkness underneath her stem. But that could not erase the damage that had already been done.

_ Give me the child, _ Sylvia said to put an end to this.

Rosa Paladiknight grew eerily still. She turned her head slowly, her face still frozen in a grimace of pain and horror. “You’ll help him?”, she rasped.

Sylvia could not lie. She had told the woman that the babe was beyond saving and it was. But there was another way.  _ You will have your son _ , she promised,  _ and he will remain unaffected by sickness from the day I will put him into your arms. But you must give me a month to transform the child. A month in which I expect to be undisturbed. Will you bear to part from him? _

“Sylvia,” Efraim warned and his brows furrowed. His eyes were asking her  _ what are you doing? _ This was what she was doing: she was offering that woman happiness and peace. Perhaps not in the way she had wished for, but for that she would ask for no payment. This was only fair, right?

Rosa was so eager to believe that her son could be rescued that she raised the infant to the dryads welcoming arms without any further questions. “Take him,” she said and sounded almost hungry. Sylvia did. She stroked Leorio’s soft, but cold cheeks and the tuft of black hair that had been growing on his head. He still smelled pleasant, like babies did.

_ All I ask from you in return is that you love him fiercely and nurture him; his health will come with the price of a great hunger.  _

And then Sylvia held the bundle tight to her chest and lowered her palm over Rosa’s head, beckoning her to sleep. The human woman’s gaunt features went slack. She collapsed on a patch of newly grown moss, hopefully to find the rest that she deserved.

“Sylvia,” Efraim called again, and for the first time she did not like the way he said her name. So stern and disapproving, but also chiding. “Whatever you’re planning to do, it isn’t right.”

_ I’m going to give her a son that will be everything she hoped for, but stronger, more resilient,  _ she said, a little ruffled.

“But it’s not going to be  _ this  _ son, am I right?”

_ This one is lost. He deserves to be put to rest, but he can be the soil in which his brother will grow. They will look almost the same. She will be happy with him. I don’t understand why you have to be so morose about it. _

“You’re robbing her of the opportunity to mourn her child!”

_ Then you mourn him for her, _ she huffed.  _ She has grieved enough, don’t you think? What is so important about grief anyway, I don’t understand. _

“Of course you don’t,” Efraim muttered as he stooped low to hook his arms under Rosa’s frail legs and torso and lifted her up.

It felt like he was picking a side.

 

Alone, Sylvia freed the poor little lump that had once been Leorio Paladiknight of his clothes and placed him in the cool shade of her trunk. Then she returned to her body, better to take control of the ground surrounding her. With the myriad of fine roots that she had woven through the soil, she opened a cleft and pulled the body down, deep underneath the center of her stem. Another set of roots dug even deeper until they reached solid rock.

She had a nice little talk with the rock, although it was going kind of slow, for a rock’s life was as infinite as its nature was inorganic and their minds accordingly sluggish, lest they get bored too quick.

Seven days and seven nights their conversation lasted in which Sylvia put some of her energy into what was left of little Leorio, to keep him from decomposing. In the end, after she had promised she would take care, she was rewarded with a sprite seed, a black and shimmering mineral that was warm to the touch.

She plunged it deep into Leorio’s spine, where the neck met the skull. The seed took quickly to its new nourishment and grew. It spread through the nervous system and took over the bone marrow, feeding greedily on the potential of undivided, unspecified cells and cracking their DNA to read the blueprints for the shape it was supposed to take.

After the seed material had spread thin and mixed with organic components to shape a new nervous system, the changeling began to grow, hardening the skeleton with minerals it found in the baby’s body.

Sylvia grew a little sick when the soil of the sanctuary turned bland and the changeling started to move and thrash, biting and pulling her roots, drinking her sap. This was the hardest stage: a lot of dryads made the mistake to pull the changeling from the soil too soon and it came out looking all non-human, for as soon as the rays of the sun hit their skin, it set their shape.

She sang him songs and told him stories to help him sleep. She called out for dying animals, offering final rest by her side and once their life had ended, she buried them and fed herself and the new child.

 

When the month was over and Efraim returned with Rosa, the soil in the sanctuary was warm and loose with decomposition but because it had rained the previous night, none of the humans were surprised to find their feet sinking into the ground. A cavity had formed by the stem of the great laurel tree and although it was summer (but it was always early summer in the sanctuary), some leaves had started turning yellow and brown.

Sylvia had materialized outside of her body and reclined against one of her healthier roots, the babe nestled safely in her lap. She had tried to dress him in the other boy’s clothes, but he was too large for anything but a pair of soft pants with elastic band sewn into the hem. So he kicked his naked feet into the air, burbling happily. Rain-washed and soft, his brown eyes wide and staring, no hint remained that this Leorio had been unearthed only a few days ago. 

As soon as Rosa saw him, she screamed and her eyes lit up with joy and gratitude as she ran towards the changeling and took him from Sylvia without waiting for permission. She held him up and hugged him tight; tears spilled from her eyes onto his tawny little face. 

Leorio stirred and started crying.

Sylvia found that the noise pained her more than his teeth ever could and she was ready to snatch him back out of Rosa’s arms, because could this woman not see that she was hurting him? But she had promised. And so Sylvia said nothing, did nothing but watch how Rosa rocked the baby and planted kisses on his head until he grew quiet again, oblivious that she had not given birth to this one. Perhaps she might still notice - her face would twist into a grimace and she would reject the child and leave him behind. 

Sylvia would gladly have him. 

As if Rosa had picked up on her attention, she suddenly stopped smothering Leorio in affections and looked at Sylvia like an animal that faced a predator.

“You have saved my son,” she pressed, a little stiffly, and her lower lip quivered. “I will never forget you.” And Rosa turned her back to the great laurel tree and walked away, never to return. Because this was what it meant to say ‘I will never forget you’: it meant ‘I don’t expect to see you again.’

All the while, Efraim had not set a foot into the sanctuary. He still stood at the top of the slope, his expression unreadable. When Rosa passed him by and thanked him, he would not meet her eyes, nor look at the bundle in her arms.

“Don’t thank me,” he said or maybe it was ‘don’t thank  _ me _ ’. Sylvia extended an arm to beckon him closer. He looked embarrassed. Worried. But he did not join her that day, or any day soon thereafter.

The Will of the woods trembled as a gnawing pain got a hold of her and for the first time in centuries she felt truly alone. She felt like a part of her had gone missing. Unfamiliar with the sensation of loss, she retreated into herself. Her branches creaked and slumped. 

The light in the clearing grew duller, colder.


	6. Budding Hearts, Hungry Wilds

Kurapika could be stubborn. Kurapika could be petty. Leorio witnessed this firsthand when they returned to the farm and Kurapika went straight to his room to pack a minimum of clothes. He walked out of the door before his father even had a chance to understand what was happening or why.

One may argue if this was an apt punishment for keeping secrets from his son or if Kurapika’s response was a little over the top. Perhaps Efraim’s true crime had been to hold his wife’s otherness against her at a time when she needed his support the most and while they must have worked through this years ago, Kurapika’s anger was still fresh and raw.

This put a strange mood on Leorio’s own walk home because he had to do it alongside a silently fuming wood sprite who had somehow decided that he was moving in with Leorio for a while. And Leorio, who knew that Kurapika had nowhere else to go, did not make a fuss about it.

Besides, as far as roommates went, Kurapika was not the worst choice. He was quiet, for the most part. He provided a steady supply of freshly baked goods so long as Leorio remembered to buy enough flour and butter. And his presence motivated Leorio to more cleanliness, not that he liked to live in a total mess, but he just forgot that cleaning up was a thing sometimes. With another person in the household, the time to clean up had come when Kurapika made even the slightest effort to pick up after Leorio. (It was embarrassing beyond compare, to think that the son of the forest deity might be digging through his trash or washing his underwear.)

He even bought some potted plants, to make Kurapika feel at home. Sure, the discounted azaleas and roses that Leorio offered could not compare to the vanilla orchid that Kurapika had tended to, meticulously, for five years, but it was something wonderful to watch him prune and nurse them back into bloom. 

Soon Leorio’s apartment was lighter and livelier than ever before and Leorio found that he slept better in a crowded bed with warm limbs around his neck.

But the strangest novelty of his new living situation were the little touches that came to Kurapika so easily. He would run his hand through Leorio’s hair and play with it just because he was bored - and Kurapika got bored easily - he would playfully tug Leorio’s ears or rub his shoulders when Leorio came home from work frustrated and antsy. He didn’t even have to be in a very affectionate mood - not that affectionate was a term that Leorio generally associated with Kurapika anyway. Helpful, yes. Determined, witty, intelligent. Stubborn to a fault. He would even go as far as consider him kind, but not in that cheerful, coddling way that Leorio had experienced from the other nurses at his work.

Leorio had no idea how to repay that. He was good at hugging, he  _ lived _ for a good hug - not so much his small deer friend who hated all forms of restraint and who would respond by wriggling and flailing his way out of Leorio’s arm trap. Aside from that, Leorio was only confident in giving affections that built up to sex and he didn’t want to sleep with Kurapika just because he didn’t know any other way to appreciate him.

(He still wanted to sleep with Kurapika for a myriad of other reasons though, from the way he curled up on Leorio’s bed when he sunbathed to his habit of ‘lending’ Leorio’s shirts and wearing them as pajamas but only when they had been worn once. Kurapika also never tired of kissing and the longer the days grew, the more heat ran through his veins. Sometimes, being around him required every ounce of restraint that Leorio could summon.)

But he loved having someone to come home to, someone who knew him. Even if that person laughed at the sight of him trimming his eyebrows rather than his stupid jokes. Even if he could get snappish and confrontational and turned into an animal in the middle of a heated argument, just to keep Leorio from winning.

Leorio was foolishly and predictably falling in love.

 

But not all changes in those early summer weeks were because of Kurapika. Leorio noticed a sneaking decrease in his eyesight, while his appetite increased. He developed cravings for eggs, berries and nuts (no innuendo intended), especially roasted chestnuts. Figs, too, despite the fact that he had never eaten a fig in his entire life, but they smelled delicious. His sense of smell might have increased too, or maybe he just got overwhelmed easier. Except for the crummy eyes, which could be blamed on age and constantly staring at computer screens in the clinic, one might have thought he was pregnant - if it weren’t for the lack of necessary anatomical features, of course.

When he asked the Will of the woods about it, she responded with delight.

_ You're starting to find your balance, _ she assured him.  _ The more you change between forms, the more they will become alike. They will never be the same, but soon you may keep a clearer head when you become the boar. _

Sylvia always talked of his animal form as if it was a title, something that was written with a capital letter, something to take pride in. He wished he could share her enthusiasm.

“I’m not going to start eating trash, am I?”

And she looked at him, all sincere and asked:  _ What is trash? _

Leorio could not decide if the question was of philosophical nature or if she really was clueless (she couldn’t be, right?), so he left it at that and went to the nearest optometrist to buy contact lenses. He would have to invest in glasses eventually.

No one told him that being the guardian of a magical forest could be so damn expensive.

 

When Leorio came home and tossed his keys onto the coffee table, he noticed a basket full of fruits on the sofa that hadn’t been there before. Luscious red strawberries peeked out of a smaller bowl that had been carefully nestled between soft dates, figs, and avocados. A few stalks of rhubarb had been laid on top too. “Have you been to the market?”, he asked.

Kurapika was sitting on the floor in front of Leorio’s age old and bulky tv, passing the time by playing Final Fantasy IX, a game that he picked up after having read through all of Leorio’s books within a week. Strangely enough, it was the game within the game that had him hooked - his process on the main plot was slow because he kept challenging NPCs to Tetra Master duels.

“Papa gave them to me.”

“Your father’s been here?”

“No, I checked on the farm this morning. It’s my part of the harvest.”

This certainly explained why the fruits looked so  _ perfect _ . Leorio picked up a strawberry, regarded it from all angles and resisted the urge to sink his teeth into the plump red skin. He put it back. “How did it go? Talking to your dad, I mean, not the harvest.”

“He tried to apologize. I told him I wasn’t angry anymore.”

“Really?”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Kurapika complained.

“Don’t get me wrong, I know you’ve been over the whole thing, like, a month ago. I’m just floored you would actually admit that.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Leorio sat down next to Kurapika, but not too close, because his charming roommate had one of his no pants days and Leorio knew that if he so much as accidentally brushed against Kurapika’s thigh, he would start a dangerous chain reaction. 

“I did the laundry,” Kurapika explained, his eyes never leaving the screen.

“I can already see one shirt that you obviously forgot.”

“It’s not dirty enough yet.”

“So you had to fix that by wearing it?”

“Do you want it back?”

Leorio Paladiknight was confronted with the mental image of Kurapika stripping right in front of him and he was almost stupid enough to say yes, just to see if he would actually do it. But in a game of chicken between them there was no winner - one of them was bound to get too excited and then Leorio would retreat, leaving them both frustrated and unsatisfied.

“No, it looks good on you.”

“I know.”

“You know that you can just borrow my clothes when they’re clean, right?”

“But they don’t feel the same.”

Leorio told himself not to think of Kurapika snuggling into his shirt, he focused in particular on not thinking of the way he might straighten the collar and bury his nose in it, or him opening the first few top buttons to make sure the fabric slipped off his shoulders just a little, just enough to mesmerize but not enough to be counted as an obvious invitation.

Leorio breathed in deep and focused on the screen, he tried to make sense of the red and blue highlighted cards. “You’re losing.” 

“Shut up.”

Kurapika never lost. Not when he made an effort. So something was distracting him mightily. He looked at Kurapika expectantly, waiting. Drumming his fingers on his leg.

“My father asked me if I’d come home.”

Ah. There it was.

“And what did you say?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t you miss him? And your mom?” 

Leorio knew Kurapika kissed him differently when he came home still smelling like the woods. With more care, almost hesitantly. And it never took long until the first flowers bloomed under his touches. 

He didn’t belong in a gray apartment with naked walls, where he would pace around for want of something to do, like a caged animal. And all the potted plants in the world could not replace the vast beauty of nature, or the calm fresh air in his mother’s forest.

But Kurapika grimaced. “I’m not a  _ child _ , Leorio, so don’t you dare patronizing me. I have responsibilities to uphold and right now my main responsibility is looking after you.”

“I don’t need to be looked after.”

“You can claim that when you have full control over your transformation.”

“What about protecting the woods?”

Kurapika flipped through the game cards and eventually laid down the weakest of them, accepting his defeat. He put down the controller. “To guard is my mother’s duty. And yours. I’m a diplomat. For centuries humans have gotten hurt by the woods due to miscommunication. They turn to the dryads with their wishes and forget that they might not be understood. And as soon as things do not go their way they cry betrayal and try to lash out. My father is the closest thing to a human envoy we had so far but even he doesn’t always understand my mother… but _ I _ do. Because I have a deeper link to the woods. And you made a pact with the woods, so you’re my responsibility. Obviously, things did not work out as either of us expected but if I can help you ease into your new position, I will do that.” He folded his hands in his lap and his shoulders rose and sank with a heavy sigh. “But if you want me to leave, I’ll leave. I thought it might be easier for you if I stayed at your place, considering that you always seem to return to where I am, even if you’re not quite yourself. But if I cause you more trouble than help...”

He left a heavy-weighted pause. Leorio knew that he should have denied right away, but how was it his call in the first place? He couldn’t decide for the both of them, no way. “Okay, so, being responsible and all that crap aside, what do  _ you _ want?”

“I want to stay.”

“Really?”, Leorio blurted out. He rubbed the back of his neck and chuckled. “Wow, I didn’t think my shitty apartment had that much appeal.”

“It’s not the apartment that’s appealing, not by far.” Kurapika clarified, then added with a hum: “Although it’s nice to have some privacy for once.”

“Well, that’s relative-”

“I mean that whatever happens between you and me stays between us.”

He didn’t say ‘not that much is happening anyway’, but Leorio  _ knew _ , Leorio had tasted Kurapika’s frustration a couple of times before. Like that one time when Kurapika had started a fight about him drinking a nice cold beer on warm nights - which might appear a weird notion for a boy who brewed his own cider. But it hadn’t been about the beer anyway, it had been about the way he drank it and the way he ran his thumb over the bottleneck when he didn't drink because he always needed to touch something. It had been about him not touching Kurapika the way he wanted to be touched. Kurapika may have agreed to waiting, but he was a lot less patient than he claimed to be.

“You could come over whenever you’d like. I’m at work for most of the week anyway and it’s not that far - you don’t have to choose one place or the other, we can work something out. It’s not good for you to be holed up all the time. Especially not with me.”

“Leorio-”

He shook his head and reached out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind Kurapika’s ear. “I know I’m making this hard for you. I’m not fucking stupid. And if you want to stay, we need to find a better solution for the sleeping situation. Last night you nearly poked my eyes out with your antlers.”

“I apologized, didn’t I? And I  _ left _ .”

“I know,” Leorio assured. The truth was, he couldn't bear the thought of Kurapika feeling unwelcome and sleeping on the couch or in the shower, any more than he liked the idea of him being uncomfortable because they were too close. “Listen, I like to have you around. I really do, but I think… I gotta know what you’re expecting from this. Like, where do you want this - us - to go? Am I your boyfriend? Or am I just your friend who you want to sleep with?”

“Leorio,” Kurapika said, “I don’t  _ get _ you. You asked me for more time. You wanted to take things slow. I got the impression that this means dating, except you never leave your house and you haven’t asked me out  _ once _ . And whenever we kiss, you eventually ask me to stop and retreat. I didn’t get the impression from you that you had made up your mind,  _ at all _ , about whether you want this or not, so I didn’t press and now you ask  _ me _ if I want you to be my boyfriend?”

“Right,” said Leorio. A jab of pain manifested behind his eyes and he pressed them shut, massaging the bridge of his nose. Sometimes he forgot that Kurapika’s knowledge had limits, that his relationship with societal expectations was a distant one, something he may have heard and read about but that he had not experienced himself. “You have point; I should have made myself clearer. So, this is where we stand? We’re both serious about this?”

Kurapika rolled his eyes ever so slightly. “ _ Yes. _ ”

“Good. Because, you know, sometimes it’s nice to hear it out loud. That’s a couple thing, by the way. Actually talking about stuff, I mean” Leorio informed, with a flutter in his voice.

Kurapika raised an inquiring eyebrow. “I think the appropriate idiom in this case would be ‘the pot calling the kettle black.’”

“I know, I know.” Leorio chortled and buried his hands in his lap, because in his simmering excitement, he didn’t know what to do with them. It dawned him that he had a boyfriend now, something he never thought possible for as long as he lived in this town. “Truth be told, this is all very new to me too. But I’ll try. I’ll try my best.” He felt his face twist into a giddy grin, felt rapture rise up inside him and fill his chest until he could no longer breathe.

Kurapika’s eyes grew soft and he leaned over to plant a kiss on Leorio’s cheek, whispering tenderly in his ear how very stupid he looked right now.

“You have that effect on people, darling,” Leorio laughed and Kurapika sat back, scrunching up his nose like he bit on something sour. “Not a fan of nicknames, huh?”

“Not a fan of sweet talk.”

Something wild and naughty flickered in Leorio’s eyes. He trapped Kurapika in his arms and started spilling disgustingly embarrassing adorations, bad poetry rolled off his tongue easy as pebbles bumping down a slope because he didn’t mean anything, he just wanted to see Kurapika lose his elegant poise and make him squirm with embarrassment and withheld laughter, until his cheeks glowed and his chest trembled, until he kissed and bit him on the lips just to make him shut up.

 

* * *

 

 

The boar walked as if in a dream. Invisible needles pricked his hind legs, and shadows fogged his world, dancing before his eyes like a cloud of oil stirred in water. There was no recognition, only the moment: he saw, he acted on impulse but his mind was impervious to the meaning of the world around him. Tonight the woods smelled of honey, blood and death. A swarm of angry bees protected the place where the stink was strongest: their earthen home had been disturbed by a pair of humans that was no more alive than broken dolls. Glassy eyes, open ribcages.

The stench was hurting the boar, so he shrank into his other skin and toppled to his knees, resting his palms on the still warm doll-bodies. Whatever duty he may have had, it no longer weighed on his temples, and his nerves did not fray with danger. Without a purpose or a predator to chase away, he moved on.

He went home.

 

Home, for the boar, meant food and shelter. It was the place where someone was waiting for him, a boy that smelled like fresh leaves, like yeast and sugar and delight. (And flowers - he smelled like flowers when he was stressed or excited, overwhelmed.) The boar was drawn to that boy, for he was born to serve and protect him, but a part of him - the part that had been cultivated with human mannerisms and anxieties - longed for him in a fiercer, yet cherishing way. 

Not a single window was alight in town. All was sleeping, all but him, who picked his keys up with his sleeves over his fist. He unlocked the door and stepped into darkness.  And once he crossed the threshold, he was just Leorio again: bent, disoriented and a little out of it.

His fingers were sticky with blood.

 

Kurapika was mercifully asleep, but Leorio still felt the pressure of something springing on him at any moment. He snuck into the bathroom to scrub his hands clean. Cold water met cold skin and he picked up the soap and rinsed and rinsed until the water ran clear into the drain and no pink speck remained on the porcelain. He pulled his shirt over his head and buried it at the bottom of the dirty laundry bag. His pants were blotted with stains too, from  the knees to the ankles stretched mud-brown and green smears. Upon closer inspection, he found not a single russet spot among them. Leorio made a mental note to wash a load of laundry in the morning, while Kurapika was busy with breakfast.

When he dropped his pants to his ankles, he also noticed a mesh of of half-healed cuts, crisscrossing all over his legs, covered in raised scab - so he  _ had _ bled tonight. No way to tell how much. Surely, this was a good enough explanation why his heart raced until the room spun around him. No need to worry. 

He always assumed the worst anyway.

 

Leorio knew his apartment well and under different circumstances, he could have moved in it quiet as a ghost, rather than bumbling around and stubbing his legs against the furniture like a drunken fool. But all the noise he made had the benefit that by the time he slipped under the covers, Kurapika turned to welcome him with open arms and half-lidded eyes. 

He mumbled something about popsicles as his hands slipped over Leorio’s skin, skin which was prickling with goosebumps.

“You’re shaking,” Kurapika breathed. “What’s wrong?” 

“Dunno,” Leorio whispered, his voice so heavy that he nearly choked on it. “Just feeling weird.” He clung to Kurapika and shifted to tuck his head in the crook of his boyfriend’s neck. “Don’t go.”

“I won’t,” Kurapika promised, placing his hand on the back of Leorio’s head, curling his fingers through short, bristly hair in gentle, soothing motions. After a while, Leorio closed his heavy eyes. Not to sleep, but to daze and let his mind drift away and float aimlessly, aware of nothing but the diffuse weight of his body and the slow rise and fall of Kurapika’s chest under his arms.

The rhythm was interrupted when Kurapika whispered: “Would you stop breathing on my neck, though, it’s irritating.”

Leorio made a bothered noise that sounded less like a whine and more like a door creaking, as he nuzzled his boyfriend's neck even deeper. “Not happening,” he slurred.

“Leorio!”, Kurapika urged. He squirmed slightly, which only prompted Leorio to hold him tighter, snuggle deeper. As he was about to wedge his leg between Kurapika’s, he noticed something. Kurapika inhaled sharply. 

A sweet floral scent spread, like daisies on a spring meadow.

_ Oh _ , Leorio thought.

When Kurapika squirmed again, Leorio released his grip a little, allowing just enough room for the other to turn his back to him

“Don’t go,” Leorio begged again, feeling the curve of Kurapika’s shoulder and placing a kiss there. “We can stay like this, right?” As to emphasize, Leorio pulled himself flush against Kurapika’s back, mapping his shape with his own. His legs didn’t quite fold against his boyfriend’s, but that wasn’t too bad.

Kurapika was still, almost rigid and after a few seconds of hard silence, he pressed: “Leorio, that’s not helping. _ At all _ . Just let me-”

“Don’t wanna. I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss about it, it’s just a boner. They happen all the time. No need to be embarrassed about it,” Leorio assured, partly because he couldn’t bear to be alone right now, partly because he knew what it was like to feel guilty about something that you couldn’t help, something perfectly natural. It was dumb and he would have spared anyone else feeling this way, if he could. “I don’t mind at all.”

“Well,  _ I _ mind.” Kurapika’s voice sounded muffled now, as if he had turned his face to the pillow. “You turned to me for comfort, not for…  _ this _ .” 

“That’s terribly considerate of you. Who are you and what did you do to my boyfriend?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Make me.” Leorio let his hand trace the side of Kurapika’s body, guessing the shape of him under the well-worn fabric of his own favorite shirt. Cologne and the smell of Kurapika’s floral excitement mingled in the collar where Leorio buried his nose, trying to find a soft spot to kiss. If he could, he would have buried his entire self in Kurapika. Hide in his embrace. Sleep, and let the beat of his heart become his lullaby. He would have been content with closeness alone, and yet…

Kurapika cursed when Leorio pressed his hand against the taut muscles of his stomach, tense with anticipation.

“You’re cold!”

“Then warm me up.” He pressed his lips on Kurapika’s neck lazily, treating his skin with the gentle affection of an admirer, rather than a hot-blooded lover. Which was not to say that he did not try to summon the amorous moods that had caused them so much frustration the past weeks, but it was drowned out by the low hum of anxiety that would not leave his body, the certainty that something terrible would happen, that something terrible had already happened. Still, Leorio would be damned if he let that stop him from giving his boyfriend what he wanted.

He kissed Kurapika harder, and played with the soft nub of his nipple until it was soft no longer. Kurapika trembled, then begged, whispering Leorio’s name like he was unable to say anything else. 

“Pika,” Leorio whispered against his neck.

“Yes?” The answer immediate, the words hoarse.

“You know where I keep the condoms and the lube, right?”

“I do.”

“Get ‘em.”

Kurapika bolted out of bed without a second thought, causing a crash and a thud as he bumped into some piece of furniture in his haste. He hit the light switch before he slammed the bathroom door. The living room burst into vision with a brightness that hurt Leorio’s poor eyes.

He let out a nervous chuckle and dragged his hand across his face, ignoring the tiny voice in the back of his head that asked him what the fuck he was doing.  _ I’m going to have sex with my boyfriend _ , he thought, almost stubbornly. His chest did not feel lighter. The diffuse urgency did not wane; he still felt like there was something not quite right, like there was something he was supposed to do, something he forgot…

He sat up and scratched his stomach, squinting against the light. Was he actually missing something or was his brain playing tricks on him? He hated that he couldn’t tell. He hated that he had to be this way.

And then Kurapika rushed out of the bathroom and came upon him like a taifun, dropping some necessities on the mattress just so he would have his hands free to seize Leorio by the shoulders and drown him in kisses. He crawled onto Leorio’s lap, a nice, distracting weight that shifted slightly with every time he dipped low to capture and release Leorio’s lips.

Leorio had to tap on his collarbone to get a break for a moment.

Kurapika mistook the gesture as an invitation to strip and pull the shirt over his head, which… did not help Leorio to find his voice again, as he was confronted with a lot of creamy skin that just begged to be touched.

“Kurapika, slow down before you kill one of us,” he groaned. 

“Not possible,” was the reply, accompanied by the cutest bumbling laughter. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for years, I’m not going to stop now.”

“Years? You had a thing for me for years? Wait…” Something occurred to him. Something impossible and ridiculous and too good to be true. “So when I kept seeing the stag in the woods, it wasn’t some sort of ominous reminder? You were just checking me out?” 

“You make it sound so horrible.”

“Answer the question, plant boy”, Leorio exclaimed, with a smug grin.

“Yes,” Kurapika hissed, as if it was painful to admit. He reached for Leorio’s hands and placed them on his hips. “Yes, I’ve been spying on you because I was curious about you. Are you happy now? Can we go back to touching?”

“Gladly.” Leorio swallowed. He ran his palm over Kurapika’s side, then captured his chin, demanding the full attention of his boyfriend. “Just so we’re clear, penetration is off limits for now.”

Kurapika looked taken aback. “Okay? Why.”

“Because you haven’t ever - no no, don’t give me that look, _ listen _ . As far as sex goes, this is the worst place to start. It requires trust and a shitton of preparation and it’s not going to be very sexy at first. You’re going to feel very exposed and awkward at first and you might not like it at all. You don’t have to. Some couples never go for the, um, the butt stuff, so to speak” Leorio was a bit thrown off in his speech when Kurapika giggled and hid his mouth behind his hand. He cleared his throat and tried to get back on track. “-And, uh, it doesn’t mean they have a less fulfilling or intimate relationship.”

“Why do I get the impression this turned into a lesson?”

“Because it is one. You and I are going to find out together what you like and don’t like. And first of all I need you to understand that you can tell me to stop anytime. For whatever reason. And if I’m doing something that makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, you need to let me know right away. Okay?”

Kurapika hummed and ran his thumb over Leorio’s lower lip. “I never knew sex involved that much talking.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean it’s boring, you know. It’s all about  _ how _ you say it. Nothing’s as attractive than knowing that you’re wanted.”

“Is that so?, Kurapika asked. He put his arm around Leorio’s neck and tilted his head invitingly. Slowly, his free palm slid up Leorio’s thigh. “I have a hard time believing this. Of course, you’re free to change my mind.”

Leorio’s heart jumped in his chest. He was overly aware of how his skin tingled under Kurapika’s touch. “Are you asking for a little demonstration?”

Kurapika batted his lashes. Poppies sprouted underneath his hand, gangly and a little hairy. “That might help.”

Leorio eyed the flowers and knew that underneath the flowing fabric of his sleeping shirt, Kurapika was still hard, just waiting to be caressed. All in due time, he promised himself. 

He hadn’t expected to get much sleep anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

Leorio regularly woke up Kurapika with his nightmares, even if he was eerily quiet when he had them - he tossed and moaned, mumbling intelligible things until he slipped back into a waking state. Then he would exhale noisily through his nose, rub over his face and check if Kurapika was awake. If he was, Leorio would slur an apology and throw an arm over his boyfriend, and go back to sleep.

Usually this happened between two and three in the morning, when the night was at its most quiet. Leorio not always remembered. 

This time, when he started to stir and twitch, the sky had already lit up with the first morning glow and the songbirds had started chattering, quarreling, wooing. Kurapika, who was used to rising early, slipped out of bed and into Leorio’s bathrobe. It fell around his shoulders like an emperor’s coat: the collar almost swallowed his neck, the hem dragged over the floor, gathering up dust. But somehow, looking like the Snow Queen ready to whisk away Kay from his playmate was better than being naked, now that his nakedness served no purpose anymore. And it was quick to undo, should the opportunity arise. 

He was set on waking Leorio gently, before the worst horrors would unfold. Kurapika crawled back onto the mattress and laid down on his side, better to watch how the soft morning light fell onto Leorio’s heaving chest. He reached out to stroke his knuckle gently over the rasping stubble of his boyfriend’s jaw and called his name, teasing every syllable.

A jolt went through Leorio’s arm, his hand twitched.

His eyes flew open, dark and distant. 

He gasped as if he had just resurfaced from a deep dive and said, his unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling: “There’s dead bodies in the woods.”

Kurapika shushed him, whispering that it was just a dream. He placed his lips against Leorio’s neck and left a trail of kisses down to his collarbone.

“I don’t think it was.” Leorio said, “I- I think I remembered. Last night… there were people in the woods. I was attacked, but not by them. I don’t think they were hunters, but… I had blood on my hands when I came home. And it wasn’t mine.”

Kurapika hummed absentmindedly and bedded his head on Leorio’s shoulder. He saw no reason to be alarmed just yet, although the fear in Leorio’s eyes was very real. “How much blood?”, he asked.

“A lot. All over my palms and fingers.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s human blood.”

“Pika, I-” he drew in a shaky breath. “I think I remember pulling my hands out of their chests.” He swallowed hard. As he blinked a couple of times, his eyes started to shimmer with wetness. “This is bad. This is real bad.”

Kurapika raised his head and grabbed Leorio by the chin, forcing him to look into his eyes. “Calm down.  _ Breathe _ . We have no real evidence that anything like that happened, so let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“But-”

“We’ll find out,” Kurapika promised. “We’ll go into the woods and see if we can find the source of the blood. But first, you’re going to shower and get dressed. I’ll make us breakfast and then we’ll face this. Together. No need to panic unless we know more. You hear me?”

Leorio nodded. He bent over to kiss Kurapika’s forehead, then threw back the covers and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Wait,” Kurapika whispered. “What’s that on your leg?”

Leorio blinked and peered languidly down at himself. “Oh, right. I caught some scars last night.. I must’ve scratched my legs open in the woods.”

“Weren’t you wearing any pants?”

“That’s the funny thing,” he said and rubbed his cheek. Kurapika liked the scraping noise his stubble made against his palm. “I was. And they weren’t ruined or anything. Maybe I rolled them up.”

“Or you weren’t human when you got those cuts.”

“Oh-kay?”

Subjectively, it was too early for a lesson in transformation science - if science was a term that applied in this case. Objectively Leorio should have learned about this right from the start. Kurapika propped his head up on his arm and drew his legs closer to his body, trying to find a more comfortable position to lie in. “Think of your second skin as something that lies upon your human form and I don’t mean that in logistic terms, more like… layers of reality. If you get injured, the clothes you wore don’t get affected because technically, they don’t exist in this moment. Because you - the human you - does not exist that very moment. But you’re still  _ you _ even in a different shape, so the wounds you receive as the boar will show up on your skin, no matter which form you take, and vice versa.”

“So that time when your antler broke off-”

“It was like being dealt a heavy blow to the head,” Kurapika finished.

“Jesus.”

He offered a wan smile. “You should know. You took that from me.” 

(And he still owed Leorio so much because of it. Too bad there was no way to help him control this particular gift, if it could be controlled at all. Because he did not understand it himself. The best thing Kurapika had been able to do was to inform Leorio that it existed, so that he may figure it out himself but if any success had been made in that regard, Leorio hadn’t shared it.)

“Yeah, but I’ve been unconscious for most of it. And I think when I woke up I’ve been through the worst already.” Leorio grew quiet. Patted his thigh impatiently. Eventually, he got up and strode out of the bedroom, oblivious to the lingering gaze that traveled over his naked backside.

Kurapika bit on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from calling out and making the selfishly generous offer to join Leorio under the shower, help him relax a little. This was hardly the time.

 

Leorio had no real appetite, that much became evident by how slowly he chewed down his breakfast. Every action seemed to take twice the effort and energy, almost like his body was present but his mind was busy conjuring the worst possible outcomes.

Kurapika took the initiative. He led Leorio, for once not literally taking him by the hand as long as they were in public; he had been told that for arbitrary reasons, society considered a relationship like theirs as unnatural an inappropriate and if they were seen, it might easily yield harassment. And while he was not afraid of some random townsperson’s bigotry, he knew that ultimately, Leorio would be the one suffering for it. So he waited until they were off the street and rustling through the forest's underbrush to intertwine his fingers with Leorio’s.

 

Under the canopy of leaves the air was different. Quieter somehow. The plant life was less vigorously growing towards them; stalks and branches bent lazily in response to their presence and when Kurapika brushed his hand over a patch of moss on a dead tree stump, it whispered, but did not bloom. The plants were… not exactly afraid, for fear was an animal’s instinct, but they were shake all the same.

Which confirmed one thing: blood had been spilled by violent force. Recently. There was no greater crime to a balanced ecosystem than this: violence for the sake of violence, killing without hunger, without need. 

Kurapika turned to Leorio and told him that there was a way to speed up their search and since he now knew that there was something to find in the first place, time was of the essence. “I need you to become the boar.”

“I cannot transform on command, though.”

“I might help you with that.”

“You _ can _ ? And you only tell me now?”

“What use would that have been, huh?” Kurapika asked as he slipped out of his shoes, then his socks. As soon as his naked feet touched the ground, three-leafed clovers began to sprout. “You still have to figure out how to do it on your own and it’s not like you can romp around your apartment as a giant boar! Now, come here, I need you to look into my eyes.”

Leorio grumbled, but straightened his shoulders as if preparing for an examination or a staring contest. Kurapika reached out, fingers splayed, and pressed his fingertips against either side of his boyfriend’s face. He gazed deeply into Leorio’s eyes, trying to make out the surface of his dark irises, dark and brown like topsoil. Tried to find a pattern while his senses stretched out into the earth, to the power that hummed through the roots.

And he could sense that same power within Leorio, something brave, but disgruntled that surged when Kurapika called for it. 

Leorio’s eyes blazed scarlet. He grabbed Kurapika by the shoulders and kissed him angrily, hard enough to bruise. His skin was hot, his grip felt like two iron manacles weighing down on Kurapika, but he was still mostly human, shedding his rationale and anxieties to reveal a giant’s force. Their mouths clashed horribly, teeth met teeth as Leorio was compressed to his desires, all want and no reserve. Kurapika closed his eyes and called again to the beast within.

And just like that it was over; Leorio pushed him back and he stumbled, fell, while his lover sank to his knees, his form shifting violently like a mountain rising from the pressure of tectonic plates.

Seconds later, a curious snout tried to burrow its way under the folds of his clothes, tickling and sniffing. Laughing, Kurapika patted its soft, wrinkly skin and reached for a smooth tusk to pull himself up. “Hello, dear,” he said, brushing the dirt off his capris, “I think we haven’t properly met yet.”

The boar squeaked and shook his mighty fur, which glinted like obsidian in the sunlight and Kurapika had to resist the urge to bury his face against his warm flank and drink in the earthen aroma. There was something about the beasts quiet, lazy contentment that made him want to weep; for this was what Leorio could be, if he ever were at peace with himself. Strong and towering and beautiful. Awe-inspiring. 

The boar laid down, allowing Kurapika to mount his back. “Alright, love,” he announced and patted the bristly crown of his forest’s guardian. “Let’s find the scene of the crime.”

 

Hungry were the bees that flew lazily by, hungry were the beetles that had started to feed on the fresh carcasses of a man and a woman. Their hair shimmered vibrantly in the sunlight: hers was dyed teal, his a splendid copper. Both had cuts on each limb that were black with necrosis, and their ribcages had been pried open.

Kurapika slipped off the boar and said his thanks, placing a kiss on the top of the beasts nose. “You have served me well,” he whispered, “but I need Leorio back now.”

The boar slumped and fell to his side; tendrils of mist rose from its fur as it shrank and rolled onto its back until a man lay in its stead, staring to the skies ahead. Kurapika pored over him, waiting for the wild red glow to fade from his eyes.

Leorio blinked up against the sun. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Kurapika replied, tenderly. “You might not want to see what we found.”

“I know.”

“Take your time.”

“No, I’m good,” Leorio promised as he rolled over and rose, stretching his limbs. Kurapika nodded and strode to the grisly scene, kneeling down between the bodies. His head bowed low, peering first at one, then the other, studying the damage that had been done. Some of the internal organs looked ruptured, as if they had been struck with a heavy force or-

( _ “I think I remember pulling my hands out of their chests,” _ Leorio had said.)

Perhaps something had sat on them as it tore them open, something with long limbs and merciless claws, and a dozen hungry eyes.

“Their hearts are missing,” Kurapika announced, for it was the most important bit of information. He received no reply. Throwing a glance over his shoulder, Kurapika saw Leorio still standing behind him, stiff and immobilized, his face turning more ashen with every passing moment. Then Leorio’s shoulders lurched up as he jolted away, bending over and throwing up his meager breakfast by the nearest tree.

Kurapika was not sure how to react; he felt like he should offer some sort of help or assurance, but all that came out of his mouth was: “Anyway” and he focused back on the bodies, tuning out the sound of miserable retching and the roiling sensation it caused in his own stomach. Kurapika placed his fingertips on the warm, dry ground and while weeds sprung up to shake his hand, he appealed to the trees around him. Roots rose up underneath the heads of the corpses and turned them gently to the side. The necks had been punctured; the defined edges of the wounds showed signs of blackening too. 

He felt his mood plummet with what was not quite disappointment, not quite horror but it had an aftertaste of defeat.

The sound of advancing footsteps told Kurapika that his boyfriend had recovered from his shock and soon, Leorio’s shadow fell over Kurapika’s hunched figure. When Leorio spoke up, his voice was still strained, as if he was hard pressed not to gag. “How can you stay so fucking calm, looking at that?”

It sounded like an accusation. Kurapika trusted that it was none and he balled his hands to fists, so that Leorio would not notice them shaking.

“I have seen this before. On forest dwellers. Rarely on humans, they don’t have magic, so they don’t make for very nutritious prey. They’re  _ easy _ prey, though.”

“For what? Or who?”

Kurapika closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. Readied himself. “The huckops.” 

“The what now?”

“The things that come from the woods sometimes. I told you about them. Sometimes they wear human faces, sometimes they hide under the cover of the night with glowing eyes and try to lure you out, mocking you with the voices of your loved ones.” He paused, scribbling in the dirt, leaving a trace of weeds in his wake. “They showed up first when I was… I’m not sure, I must have been twelve or thirteen. There weren’t many, only one or two at once, but we didn’t know what to make of them. You know, before they came I used to sneak out into the woods at night, I would visit my mother or just play a little, without my father’s worrying eyes on me - but when the huckops showed up I had to choose if I wanted to sleep in the house or stay in the sanctuary after nightfall. They could not venture deep into the forest’s heartlands, lest my mother became aware of them and crushed them, so they stayed in the fields. And after my father stopped farming wheat, they tried to fell the trees, to weaken the woods that way. Had they traveled in packs, they might have succeeded with that, but for every tree they killed, my mother and I grew two new ones. And their numbers grew fewer when they realized we proved more effort than we were worth. I’m not sure why they came back now of all times, but it means…”

Kurapika stood, rubbing his thumb over his palm. He knew there was no delaying the inevitable. He  _ knew _ . But these creatures had dictated so much of his life, had constricted his freedom and he didn’t want to go back to that just yet. “I need to return to the farm, I’m sorry.”

“Why? I mean, your dad knows how to deal with them, right? He’s not going to be in danger, is he?”

“It’s not about that. I know Papa can hold his own, but they’re not just randomly attacking people. They… they want  _ me _ , for some reason.” Kurapika swallowed and turned, only to notice Leorio squint down at him quizzically, a ‘but’ already half-forming on his lips and he needed to interrupt, before his boyfriend could come up with tempting reasons to be selfish: “I had a friend in town, you know. His name was Pairo.”

Leorio made a surprised little noise and Kurapika tilted his head, inquiring. 

“ _ The _ Pairo? The little boy that was accidentally shot by hunters?” 

He nodded. “I’m not surprised you heard about him. It caused quite an outcry.” Not enough, though. Never enough. And what the people of the town did not know - what they  _ could _ not know was that there had been nothing accidental about Pairo’s death. He had been shot because, at the time, he had been a fox. He had been  _ made  _ a fox - Kurapika had begged his mother to give his friend a second skin to grant him more mobility without relying on his prosthetic leg - and it had worked until a hunter had considered him an easy target. 

But since none of this was related to the huckops, Kurapika had an excuse to keep that fact to himself. He had buried it thoroughly in a vulnerable spot of his heart where he drew his resentment from and where it continued to pester and hurt him to this very day. 

He needed that hurt; it was the last thing that remained of Pairo.

“I couldn’t see Pairo very often; my father didn’t like the idea of me spending too much time among people. I was old enough to not turn into a deer accidentally, but I still couldn’t control my other powers very well; I had to be careful what to touch. Pairo knew what I was, though. He was too smart not to find out and I got tired of pretending. Because of that, my father eventually gave in and allowed me to stay at Pairo’s place. Besides, Pairo couldn’t walk too well, and the trip to the farm was too far for him to make on his own.

“We thought it would be safe. We never assumed the huckops would actually go as far as to the borders of town, because they never have and they cannot blend in that easily; the cold street lamp's light makes them look even more...  _ wrong _ . But the one night when I was finally allowed to sleep over, they came nevertheless.

“They called for us, tried to lure us out of the house. Luckily, Pairo’s parents were had the TV turned up too loud to notice, or else we would have needed to find a way to keep them safe as well. Still, I was terrified. And it was all  _ my fault _ . Needless to say, there were no more sleepovers after that.

“Killua thinks the reason why they’re hunting for me in particular is because I’m half human, half dryad. That they are drawn to my magic and that they try to exploit the fact that I have a lot of human vulnerabilities. He think’s I’m… I think the term he used was ‘a really tasty snack’. The forest  _ he _ comes from is crawling with huckops.” 

Killua’s knowledge of the creatures had confirmed a lot of the conclusions Kurapika and Efraim had drawn from their few and distant encounters, the most important one that the huckops were vulnerable to bullets and would shy away from the sound of a gunshot. Because of that, Efraim had joined a shooting club and went through all the legal hoops to acquire a small firearm, much to his son’s chagrin.

Kurapika hated the gun as much as he hated the hungry, disgusting things it was supposed to protect them from. Having it in the house felt like harbouring a sleeping demon; a tool though it may be, its sole purpose was to kill. He still refused to touch it.

Leorio didn’t have the safety of a gun. So Kurapika explained to him - softly, careful not to tread on any insecurities, of which Leorio had a lot - that the last thing he wanted was to draw these creatures close to him. “It’s bad enough that they managed to hurt you last night,” Kurapika added. 

“But I was fine, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, but your friends and coworkers and the other townspeople won’t be. It’s for the best if I move back to the farm. Stay away from people. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leorio grumbled and swatted his hand before his eyes. But the way he crossed his arms said  _ this is not fair _ , and his petulant silence rang louder than the buzzing of the flies that gathered, drawn to the coppery stench of old blood. He kicked up some dirt.

“We’ll still have the weekends,” Kurapika offered. “And you know you’re always welcome at the farm.” 

Leorio knew. Kurapika knew that he knew, but he needed to grumble and mope until he could make his peace with the situation and there wasn’t much Kurapika could do to make this easier. 

“What are we going to do about the bodies? We have to call the police and that means there will be an investigation, there will be people trampling about the woods trying to find evidence, ready to be eaten by those things and-”

“Leorio,” Kurapika said, grabbing his boyfriend by the shoulders. “We are obviously  _ not _ going to call the police, not a long as there is evidence to collect and certainly not after you left your DNA all over the crime scene.”

“But-”

“We will give them to the earth.”

“ _ What? _ ” 

“I know, I know. It’s just for a few months, until their bones have been picked clean and then we bring them back to the surface, so they can be identified and reunited with their families. I mean, if they had been killed by a human, I would consider another option. But we’re not covering a killer and there’s no legal justice that could be served for them.”

Leorio grumbled some more and screwed up his face like a man with a painful ulcer, except it was his conscious that he was grappling with, a deeply ingrained sense of what was right and was not - no doubt he was thinking of those who would miss these people: friends and family, sentenced to live with uncertainty and thinning hope due to a decision Kurapika had made.

“Of course,” Kurapika added then, “if you have qualms about this, I will leave them. I’m sure there is a police officer somewhere who is indebted to a dryad or who has grown up knowing about the woods. If you want to, we can search and reach out to this person. It’s your call. You are the guardian.”

Leorio remained quiet for a long time, standing still as a rock while his thoughts turned inward. Perhaps he realized then the true weight of his duty, perhaps he drew blank for a while. Either way, Kurapika did not pressure him. Neither option was the easy one.

“Shit,” said Leorio, softly. “Okay. Let’s bury them.”

 

Kurapika put on his golden hide and turned the earth. 


	7. Mimicry

The air was heavy with humidity and pollen. Crickets screeched in the grass; frogs and toads burst into croaking concerts that praised their fertility. It seemed that all the world was mating, although it might be beyond human understanding  _ why _ . The climate was suited well for sweating and distributing body odors, most of which were anything but pleasant. And while the dampness that collected in soft folds of the skin did a fine job of promoting nudity, society's standards of respectability forced people to stew in layers and layers of fabric for hours.

Leorio was sure he had never been so uncomfortable in his entire life before. After hours in a clinic crammed with concerned, impatient mothers, their screaming infants, and exhausted women in the third trimester (who, like hummingbirds, needed to be supplied with a decent amount of sugary water or juice at all times to prevent them from collapsing), he had a pounding headache, his scrubs clung to his skin in a way that made him want to tear his skin off and his nether regions felt like a swamp. Also, he had started to smell.  _ Intensely _ . Unfortunately, due to an odd strain of bacteria that seemed to inhabit his skin or merely the fact that he was a living, breathing flowerbed, his sweat stank strangely earthen and fungal. He would've been into it, if it hadn't been so...  _ non-human _ . It had been like this since puberty, although he could have sworn the smell had gotten more pronounced lately.

So there he was, struggling in the changing room one and a half hour after the clinic's official closing time, stinking like a bowl of button mushrooms, desperately trying to fight the unattractive sweat sheen on his skin with a box of wet wipes that he had borrowed from the diaper changing station in the restroom. He had just thrown on a fresh t-shirt when his boss knocked on the door.

“One minute,” he yelled, stepping into his jeans.

“Just letting you know I turned off the computers, we're ready to go whenever you are.”

“Ah,” he said, immediately regretting that he picked his tightest pair of pants when he failed to ride them all the way up his sticky legs. They had seemed a better choice this morning when all he considered was how nice his butt looked in them and who he was trying to impress. “Maybe give me two minutes.”

“So,” Dr. Yorkshire inquired briskly through the door. “You have a date tonight?”

“Uh-huh,” Leorio confirmed, thinking the conversation to be over. Cheadle Yorkshire was not the kind of woman who liked to snoop out the private life of her employees. Usually. But it seemed that even she was slowly warming up to the concept of small talk.

“Anything fancy?”

“Nah, just a little bit of baking and hanging out.”

“Baking? In this heat?”

Leorio winced as he finally got his pants over his hips and even more as he closed the zipper. “It's... my friend's dad's birthday tomorrow,” he said.

“There are no-bake-cakes.”

“Yeah, no. Apparently, cakes that don't contain yeast are not real cakes. Don't ask me why.” He dumped his dirty clothes in a bag in his locker, sprayed a generous amount of febreze on them and left them a problem for next Monday. Leorio sat down to put on his shoes and he had just tied the first one when-

“ _ Leorio.” _

“Yes?”

“I didn't say anything,” Dr. Yorkshire replied.

“Must've misheard.” It hadn't exactly sounded like her anyway. Too sweet, too low. Too much like a hushed whisper trying to catch his attention. He sharpened his ears. Crickets. Horny frog ballads. No whispers, no calls. His mind was playing a trick on him. 

He finished with his shoes and picked up his shoulder bag, so they could close up the clinic.

 

The air outside was fresher, but no less suffocatingly humid. The stephanotis that had crawled its way up the building all spring and summer had long started to bloom. Its white flowers looked like candles budding up, but by now most of their ends had opened up to five-petaled stars, emitting an overwhelmingly sweet scent. While Dr. Yorkshire fiddled with the keys, Leorio reached out to stroke some of the smooth, waxy leaves. Green vines bowed to meet him and pressed against his palm, which was flattering, really, but not exactly unsuspicious to any human witness. When he withdrew his hand a whole green, flower-bearing branch fell off and curled to a band at his feet.

“Leorio, don't break the plants,” Dr. Yorkshire chided, keys jangling as she dumped them in her handbag.

“I didn't do anything, I swear,” he said as he picked up the vine.

“Your friend is a fan of flower crowns, I guess? Or were you afraid a bouquet was too much?”

“No, I-”

“ _ Leorio.”  _ Kurapika's voice, echoing from no discernible direction.

Leorio's head perked up. “Did you hear that?”

“I did,” she said, slowly. Her eyes searched the empty roads ahead. Leorio knew that look; she usually reserved it for patients who were feeding her lies. “Probably just a kid.”

“Yeah.” There was no way that Kurapika would be in town when dusk was hanging in the air. And besides, they had agreed to meet on the farm and Kurapika was a stickler for details. Leorio twisted the flower crown in his hands. “Let me walk you home.”

“Aren't you already late for your date?”

“Exactly. Ten minutes more won't make a difference.”

“Don't be ridiculous, no one's on the streets at this hour.” Too late for the elderly to be out, too soon for the youth to have returned from their trips to the nearest city. The sky had shifted to a subtle pink.

“Doc,” he began and stepped up to her, placing the flower crown on her head. It looked just right, the vines blended in with the green dyed hair until only the flowers stood out. The crickets and frogs had fallen silent – when? He couldn't tell. “Do you have pepper spray on you?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. Cautious, but not questioning. Yet.

“Good. Have it ready. Do you trust me?”

“Leorio,” she started and he could feel a lecture coming, it was announced by the exasperation of her voice. She surprised him when she said: “I trust that you know what’s going on and I really appreciated if you told me.”

“I’m not sure if I can. But it’s really important that you do as I say: If I tell you to run, you run. Don’t turn at any strange noise you might hear, just walk straight home, close your windows and blinds and turn on some music. Don't open the door for anyone, don't invite anyone in. You hear me?”

She nodded, not even flinching at his strange request. Leorio was suddenly sure that she  _ knew _ . About the huckops or the woods, or him. 

“Alright, let's go.”

Leorio reached for the pocket knife in his bag and kept it buried in his fist as he walked beside her. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but the shadows grew dense around them and sometimes he could spot movement in the corner of his eyes. He felt invisible leaves tickle his skin. Egged on by the tension in his body, Dr. Yorkshire kept a hurried pace to her steps.

Leorio, with his larger stride had to hold back to adapt to her. It really wasn’t that far, but with his heart beating fast and anxiety prickling his neck, the space from corner to corner seemed endless. He made sure to walk in the middle of the street, keeping a distance from the dark alleyways they passed.

Finally, her house came in sight, surrounded by a dark brown picket fence and bushes of red-blossomed hydrangeas that leaned heavily against it.

Pietro’s voice called out for him and he staggered. He  _ stopped _ . Pietro was six hours of travel away, probably getting drunk at a college party, hitting on some cute people and getting in all sorts of trouble like he should. Leorio managed to persuade him to a videochat every few months and they sent each other emails at least a week, but not once had Pietro shown his face around town since he started studying. 

Still, the thing behind Leorio carried his voice.

When Dr. Yorkshire peeked over her shoulder to check on him, Leorio urged her to go, go,  _ go _ and hang the flower crown on her door once she was inside. He hoped it would actually  _ do _ something, that this was how this worked. It must have fallen into his hands for that reason, right? But that was the trouble with plants: they had no voice to explain their purpose.

Something was closing up on him.

Leorio turned his head ever so slightly, just far enough so that he could make out its shape in the corner of his eyes. His heart missed a beat. The thing was human looking, if not for the fact that dark veins swelled up where the fading daylight hit its skin. And it looked like Pietro, too. A younger, more starved version of Pietro, with sunken eyes and hollowed cheeks. Pietro as he had looked the day Leorio had brought him into the heart of the forest, when the illness had caused him too much pain to eat. The thing must have seen them. The thing must have been around back then.

“ _ What's with the cold treatment?” _ , it called.  _ “Won't you greet an old friend?” _

He swallowed. A direct stare was an invitation, wasn't it? But he knew it would follow him anyway. Just a few streets further and he would reach the edge of the forest. 

Leorio started running.

Behind him, the thing hissed.

“ _ And where do you think you're going? There's nowhere to run to, little piggy.” _

The last word echoed through the warm evening air as more and more lilting voices picked it up. He caught glimpses of movement in the shadows, of red eyes glowing.

“ _ Come here, piggy-piggy~”  _ Kurapika's voice. His mother's. Even Efraim's and Killua's and Gon’s.

The asphalt was little more than a dull sensation at the soles of his feet. He thought of green leaves stretching across a bedroom ceiling. He thought of Kurapika slapping a piece of dough on the flour dusted counter, releasing a white cloud in the air, smiling as he coughed. Kurapika, who barely ever wore an apron but complained about his clothes getting messy. Kurapika, who was waiting for him.

He thought of the poor couple they had buried in the woods, thought of shadows clawing open his legs and reminded himself that he had the power withstand these pests. That just because it wasn't running hot underneath his skin right now didn't mean it wasn't  _ there _ . 

He tried to remember what it had felt like when Kurapika had called it up from within him. The subtle press of his fingertips, the shadowy depths of his eyes casting a thrall on him. Stripping and redefining him. He remembered when the world had started to distort like he was watching it through a fishbowl, when his skin had grown taut as it struggled to contain him. 

Something snapped in him.

His breath came easier as the hum of power ran its course. 

Leorio smelled moss and sun-warmed rocks and knew that he could do it - shed his human skin as easy as peeling off his scabs. But he needed the cover of the forest’s shade. Finally, the curve of the last street came into sight, pockmarked with dandelions, seamed with poppy and cornflowers.

But his hunters were expecting him, watching from between the trees with eyes aplenty. He would run right into their arms.

There was no room for doubt.

He flicked open his knife and headed right for one of the huckops. He drove the blade in the center of its supposed forehead, the metal hissing. The huckop's skin turned grey and angry red eyes bloomed on his lanky arms like disease, turning dull. Leorio couldn't slow down to see if it was dead. And even if it was, half a dozen others still chased after him.

Bony hands snatched after his clothes, his ankles. His _ bag _ . He yanked the strap over his head and clutched it in his fist, swinging his possessions in a high arch towards the crown of the nearest tree, hoping it would catch on a branch. A crash and rustling was all the assurance he got because he couldn’t afford to turn his eyes anywhere that wasn’t ahead.

Leorio leaped into the shadow of the woods, where more of the huckops were waiting. Hungry hands and terrible mouths collided with his body. A cacophony of voices swarming him. 

Pain tore into his skin. Didn’t matter. 

He was going to outgrow it anyway.

 

* * *

 

Appointments were a strange thing, Kurapika decided, and dates were the worst kind. Although he liked the idea of choosing an outfit to match a particular occasion, the waiting period was the worst. His father and Gon had eaten dinner early, so the table was cleared and the kitchen was spotless – there was not much left for him to do to keep his hands and mind occupied. 

Kurapika picked up a book and sat down in the armchair, attempting to read, but his mind refused to latch onto the meaning of the words. It didn't take long until he was joined by Gon who had already reverted back into his wolf's skin. Kurapika didn't even think twice about sliding as far right as he could while Gon wedged his massive body into the seat with him in a complicated and hesitant maneuver. Eventually, he buried his snout in the crook of Kurapika's neck.

He caught himself checking his watch every few minutes until he buried his left hand in Gon's fur to stop. And even then his eyes kept wandering to the kitchen clock. The clinic closed at 6 pm and even if by that time all the patients had been cared for, it would still take Leorio half an hour of walking to reach the farm. Or fifteen minutes, if he took the shortcut through the woods in his animal shape.

 

Time trickled by, thick as honey. Measured in the intervals of Gon’s steady breathing.

Kurapika stubbornly stared at the words on the page, sure that if he took in their shape and meaning one by one, he would eventually slip back into the gentle rhythm of narration.

 

7 pm came and went and Kurapika's father announced that he was going to his room. 

“Gon, you should get on your way, if you want to reach Killua's place before nightfall,” he added, which earned him a dramatic canine sigh. Kurapika felt Gon shift and change and was soon squished between the upholstery and a lot more of Gon. He found it hard to breathe with his head half buried in a kermit green cotton shirt.

“Gon, please. You're not a pup anymore,” came his muffled complaint.

“'m sorry.” Carefully, he wriggled himself free. Kurapika's book fell to the ground in the process, but when Gon stooped to pick it up, Kurapika told him to leave it. “I was done reading, anyway,” he said and combed his hands through his hair in an impossible attempt to smooth it out.

“If you're sure,” Gon offered, almost cautiously. His voice lacked his usual cheer.

“What's the matter?”

“You're nervous. And not in a happy way. I hate to go when you're in that mood.”

“I'll be fine. People are late sometimes, besides, I have dad to annoy when I get bored.” 

Gon kept hovering, not yet convinced. “I could call Killua-”

“Go,” Kurapika urged. “Don’t you dare cancel your plans because of me. I don’t want to be to blame for Killua being insufferable. Well, more insufferable than usual. And text me when you get there.”

“I will.”

“And don't forget to reach into the cookie jar before you go,” Efraim piped up.

Gon's face went through a slow transformation at the mentioning of their infamous cookie jar... which did not contain cookies at all, for one day their father had decided that it was a smart thing to have a supply of condoms in the house that his boys could take whenever, and no questions would be raised. Gon’s expression shifted from confusion to realization, followed up by a mixture of mild disgust and indignation. “It's not like that between Killua and me,” he swore.

“I know, but these things change fast and I'd rather know you're safe.”

Gon looked back at Kurapika, his eyes pleading for help. Kurapika pitied him, but he also enjoyed the shameful brotherly delight that for once it wasn't him who had been put on the spot by their father. “Leave him, papa,” he laughed. “If he says he won’t need them, he won’t need them. Besides, I bet Killua has been taking from the jar more than once.”

“Nooooo,” Gon whined. “Don’t tell me these things.”

“Too late,” Kurapika said and raised his hands innocently. He giggled when Gon stuck out his tongue and went to fetch his backpack.

 

Kurapika watched his father lean in the doorway, his shoulders drawn up in a way that was so very untypical for him, his face shrouded in thought.  _ Fretting _ . He was not a fretting sort of person.

Kurapika picked up the discarded book and left it on the coffee table. He stepped up to his father, resting a hand on his back for support. “Papa...”, he began.

“That boy has a way of getting in trouble.” Efraim Kurta cleared his throat. “You all do. And that's alright, but I'd rather know about it. Although I understand that there will be things you may not want to talk to me about. It's just-” He sighed and slumped. “I kind of miss the time when I just had to worry about stopping you from eating the topsoil.”

“You love to bring that up, huh?”

A smile twitched over Efraim's lips, carving his wrinkles deeper. Kurapika had to stop himself from reaching out and trying to physically smooth them with his thumb. His father had aged kindly, which had everything to do with his mother's magic and nothing with the woods and the terrors they attracted. The older he got, the more he grew sure that his mother and the woods were not the same thing; that the woods were a force that his mother tapped into and controlled to an extent and he sometimes wondered what that meant for him, what that meant for all of them.

“I'm sorry,” Efraim said suddenly.

“What for?”

“I... I'm sure I didn't always do you right. But  _ you _ ... raising a human child is hard enough, much less one that turns into a deer at random times. I was stumped, most of the time. There was no one to turn for advice. And then these  _ things _ started showing up-”

“Papa-”

“I'm sure it must be hard for you to see Gon enjoy a freedom you never had.”

Kurapika raised his eyebrow. “I'm not  _ bitter _ about it,” he said defensively. It wasn't even a lie, at least he didn't think it was. “It's not like I could have expected a normal life anyway.”

“We could have tried. You could have tried to – to pass as human. I could have sent you to school and you could have made friends and-”

“I had Pairo. You think I could have just gone back to a play pretend human life after what has been done to him? No. And for the record, I'm not dead yet, I still have plenty of years ahead of me in which I can enjoy taxes and going to the movies and yelling about sports.”

Any other time, this would have made his father smile. That it failed now made Kurapika wonder how long his father had festered this doubts of his and if they had grown stronger after their little fallout.

“But the woods,” Efraim said. Kurapika leaned against his side and wrapped his arms around his father’s mid. “I’m not bound to this place like mama is. I have no  _ roots _ . I can go wherever I want, I just had no reason to leave. Although… it would be nice to go on vacation every now and then. Just an idea. We could go in the winter, when there’s not much crops to tend to.”

“And where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere warm and sunny, with a coast. I’ve never been to the sea.”

“Yes, because the sun and the salt would burn your skin, and we would have to spray you with water mist every minute” Efraim teased and pressed a kiss on his son’s crown. “But if you think it will be worth it, I’m not going to stop you. Now, if you excuse me, it’s bedtime for old people.”

“You’re not  _ that _ old.”

“What do you know, you’re only a little sprig.”

Kurapika groaned. 

“Well, you know how to find me if you need me. Don’t bother knocking, just come in. I’ll be listening to some music so you two don’t have to worry about being loud.”

He did not want to ask what his father meant with ‘being loud’, but he was sure it had nothing to do with  _ talking _ volume. There were topics he did not want to discuss with either of his parents and this was on the top of the list. Kurapika shot his father a stern, disapproving look and punished him with silence as he watched him disappear into the hallway.

As soon as Efraim was out of sight, Kurapika poked his head into the kitchen cabinets and started gathering the baking ingredients and tools, sure that it couldn’t be long now until Leorio arrived.

Once that was done, he reclined on the couch.

 

He must have dozed off because the next thing he remembered was jerking awake at the sound of a thump outside. Kurapika checked his watch: it showed a few minutes before 8 pm. His jumpsuit had gotten all wrinkly from sitting but there was no use fixing that now, the best he could do was unstuck the fabric from his thighs. The couch’s grain had imprinted on his skin, too. He ran his hands through his hair and shook it up, trying to achieve a tousled look that appeared more… on purpose.

Kurapika exhaled and tried to fight the excited yet crooked smile that snuck onto his lips. He failed horribly. Nor could he stop himself from rushing to the door and yanking it open with fervor.

“You're late, you-” The last word, a very special brand of sugarsweet insult, died in his throat.

“I’m sorry,” Leorio repeated breathlessly. “I ran into a bit of trouble.”

He had blood on his face. And on his shirtsleeves. Trails of it led down his arms, painted by gravity. In in the lost glow of the dying day it looked almost black. 

“No,” Kurapika breathed. This couldn’t be happening. Not now, not to  _ Leorio _ \- Kurapika’s eyes widened, taking in every detail. The scratches on his neck and the dark and prominent veins, swollen with venom that had spread from a scraped cheek. Gashes in his t-shirt promised deeper wounds, inflicted by sharp claws. 

“Kurapika,” Leorio said slowly. He sounded tired. Exhausted. “Can I come in or do you want to stare at me all night?”

Kurapika tore his gaze off the impossible. The unthinkable. “I- wait. I’m gonna-” He turned and looked at the kitchen helplessly, just an array of cupboards and drawers that didn’t mean anything anymore except they had a first aid kit  _ somewhere _ , but he couldn’t remember  _ where _ because it’s been years since they had needed something bigger than a plaster. “Don’t bleed on the floor, I swear-”, he said and swore nothing, but the thought of Leorio’s blood dripping on his kitchen tiles made his blood run cold because this was not supposed to happen, not here, not in his home, the place where he was supposed to be safe-

Kurapika searched frantically, opening and shutting the cupboards with a bang until he remembered that they kept the kit with the tools and the flower pots and the rarely used kitchen apparatuses right next to the space under the sink which was reserved to cleaning supplies. He put it on the counter, made a grab for the gauze and the tampons and ran back to the front door because Leorio - darling fool that he was - had actually listened to him and  _ stayed outside _ . Kurapika wasn’t sure if he should kiss or shake him as he stepped out into the night and pulled up the hem of Leorio’s t-shirt. He was too focused on prodding at the sticky skin to feel the edges of a wound to notice the way Leorio’s eyes darkened.

“I can’t see a thing, shit.” At least it wasn’t bleeding too badly, so he could just wash off the blood and rinse out the wound, make sure no fibers were stuck in it when he wrapped it up. They had hand sanitizer in the bathroom but he wasn’t sure if that was safe to use with flesh wounds and there was no alcohol in the house except for a few bottles of cider. He had to get his father. His father would know.

A shriek in the woods made Kurapika flinch and drop some of the tampons. It sounded like a pig being stabbed. A large pig.

Leorio’s hand clamped down on his wrist, painfully tight.

“Did I hurt you?”, Kurapika asked, his heart still racing from the scare. A  _ pig _ . In the woods. 

A series of memories flitted through his mind: Leorio rolling over in his sleep, his snoring interrupted by the tiniest grunt. The black boar rolling his back over their frozen fields while letting out a series of distressed squeals, its skin dissolving to smoke. Pairo at dusk in a sea of gray wheat, calling out to him although he was three months dead.

The thing that wore Leorio’s face slipped on a grin that stretched the mouth too wide.


	8. Infection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, here we are. An update after more than a year. I'm sorry it's not the final chapter yet, but hey, more story for you, right? I'd also like to thank glittercracker for editing and being v supportive and I'd like to thank all my friends who didn't give up on me or this fic

He had a thick skin. He’d always had a thick skin in this form he supposed, but for the first time his head was clear enough to enjoy it. His poor eyesight still required some getting used to but he didn’t need to see the trees to scrape his poor itchy skin along their bark and hopefully push some of the huckops off. They still threw their combined weight against his flanks and he swayed like a ship in the storm - so he fell to his side just for the fun of it, burying quite the number of creatures underneath.

Getting back up was a little more difficult, considering he had more inert mass to get into motion. Already the next pesky demon crawled up his back, and another drove its pointy claws into Leorio’s snout - he squeaked and bit its head off. Tasted like rot. Smelled like rot too. No wonder they preferred to roam the forests; in a place that was constantly growing and decomposing, their stench would blend right in as long as their numbers kept small.

Leorio threw his head to the side to spit out the nasty residue and accidentally impaled yet another huckop on his tusk. 

He rose to his feet and trotted away. Between all the shoving and scratching it was hard to keep a straight path, but Leorio staggered deeper in until he caught a whiff of water and algae. The creek? He couldn’t hear the water mumble to greet him, so-

They started shoving him now. Leorio grunted in surprise and shook his massive flank. He scuttled away, onto softer, muddier ground. 

He didn’t see the lake until it was too late.

Another push and he slipped forward, headfirst into the water.

He screamed.

Fear shrank Leorio back into his smaller skin, his arms flailed futilly as the black water closed over him and he sank. He sank  _ fast _ . His lungs were half filled with a last breath and already his chest  felt uncomfortably tight, like a giant invisible hand was seizing his rib cage.

He was going to die.

Panic burned cold through his veins.

A turbulence in the water hit his skin, a hand scraped over his scalp and settled at the back of his neck. Had his hunters followed him into the water? Something soft collided with his body, stringy tendrils stroked his cheek – no. Not a plant, but  _ hair _ . A cold mouth pressed against his own.

His lungs ached.

He parted his lips and a stream of warm air was pushed into his mouth. Thin, but breathable.

An arm wrapped around his torso, long and slender and pulled him up. Leorio closed his eyes.

He was hauled to the surface and dropped carelessly in the soft grass, a knee dug uncomfortably into his stomach and two impossibly strong hands pinned his shoulders down.

Leorio coughed and blinked the water from his eyes – and stared right into a way too familiar face. The nix grinned down wildly at him, exposing a set of luminescent teeth. Her slick hair was wrapped tightly around her naked limbs and woven through with water lilies. “So we meet again,” she purred.

Leorio spat and rubbed his lips as he remembered that she had kissed him,  _ again _ .

The nix laughed. “Relax, little pebble. I didn't put a spell on you, the stag would have my head for it.”

“I'm not a fucking pebble,” he growled.

“But you swim like one.”

Leorio was going to tell her to fuck herself, but he was distracted by the fact that they were surrounded. The remaining huckops had gathered in a half circle by the shore, keeping a safe distance, but shivering with need.

“ _ This is  _ our _ prey,”  _ one of them insisted (or perhaps it was all of them, it was hard to tell when their voices did not come from their mouths and echoed strangely up to the forest’s canopy).  _ “Hand it over.” _

The nix stood up and Leorio quickly averted his eyes from the flower that bloomed between her legs. He rolled onto his stomach.

“And this is  _ my _ lake.”

“ _ Water woman, give up the pig or share his fate.” _

“Then come take me, you filthy little imps.” A tangle of vines and hair shot forward from her head and wrapped around the neck of the nearest huckop, snatched it to her feet. The nix crushed its head with the force of her heel.

Leorio's stomach turned at the awful splat it made. Without thinking twice, he changed shapes: he wanted nothing more than to bolt and leave this mess behind, leave this fight for another night. These monsters had been around for years and they would be around for years to come – but he owed the nix. And one less huckop meant one less threat to the safety of the woods and the people who lived alongside it.

He charged towards them.

* * *

After he and the nix had crushed even the last fiend under their hoof and palm, she wrote her name into his fur, so that he would remember to tell the Stag that it had been Siberia the daughter of stagnant waters who saved his life. “And make sure his pup knows it too,” she added with a titter, as she slipped back into her lake.

Leorio  _ snorfed _ and teetered slowly out of the woods, his huge heart pumping too loudly in his chest, as if it threw itself against the restraints of his rib cage. He was a towering beast and a single huckop’s venom could not hurt him, but two dozens of their bites could sway even him.

On his way home he buried his snout in the still day-warm soil, inhaling deeply the calming aroma of mushrooms and moss, picking up the odd chestnut and cracking it loudly between his teeth. He would be fine. It was finally over. 

And then, he picked up a whiff of blood.

The boar stumbled forward a little quicker. Curious and cautious, but not yet alarmed. 

The scent grew stronger as it mingled with the smell of ripe fruit to an enticing, yet stomach-turning perfume. Leorio turned as he stepped into the orchard, searching with his human eyes, running his human hands over the bark of the trees whose seeds he carried here - which he would never remember, but the knowledge  _ felt  _ right, like being offered a plump little fig and knowing its sweetness before one buried one’s teeth in it.

The trees of the orchard did not whisper, for they were not alive like the trees in the forest and so the farm was too quiet to his tastes. No laughter rang from the house, no light burned on the porch. 

The front door stood ajar like a gaping mouth with a bulging tongue, for a shadowy figure sat on the threshold. Leorio squinted against the darkness. He could make out a pale face, dark hair.

“Mister Kurta?”  he called out.

He received a metallic  _ click _ as response as the figure raised its arm. A shot tore through the night. Leorio staggered back, almost tripping over his feet, closing his eyes against the impact... but nothing happened, pain didn’t burst through his body like an explosion. He hadn’t been hit. Had probably not even been aimed at.

“What the shit was that for?”

The shadow rose to its feet. “Leorio?” said Efraim. Something quite like fatigue muddled his enunciation. “It’s really you, is it?”

“Well, I would hope so,” Leorio scoffed and wondered if Efraim couldn’t see him any better than he could see Efraim. Then Efraim said: “If you are Leorio, as you claim to be, you’re welcome in this house.”

Leorio blinked and his guts stirred with the uncomfortable certainty that he was not the only one who had seen a huckop tonight.

The front windows lit up behind Efraim, yellow and muted behind the drawn canvas curtains. And maybe it was that very artificial light, but Kurapika’s father looked a lot older than Leorio remembered. Not grayer, but more hunched and worn-down. He had lowered his gun, which he held like a man who would have rather tossed it away, but knew he needed it. Leorio didn’t know much about firearms, but the gun looked small and sensible, built to fit well into a palm. In other words, it looked horrible.

He went inside.

His eyes immediately trailed right, to the kitchen, where plenty of baking supplies had been set aside. A mint colored, round cake pan had been put on the kitchen island, while the counter was stocked with scaled jugs, a carton of eggs, a bowl and a rolling pin. The one apparent thing missing was the baker.

Leorio looked left to the living room and spotted a gloomy, fair-headed person slumped on the corner of the sofa. Not the one he had been looking for, though. 

“What are  _ you _ doing here, kid?”

It was just supposed to be him and Kurapika tonight. And Efraim, of course, because you could not kick a man out of his own house for a date with his son, that was just  _ rude _ . Still, Kurapika had promised that his father would not disturb them and that did not sound like a way of subtly communicating, ‘I also intend to invite Killua as a chaperone because you like him so much.’

Killua grunted dismissively and drew up his shoulders, looking less approachable than ever. He refrained from throwing a sneer i n Leorio's direction , which was when Leorio knew something was very, very wrong - although the blood he had smelled earlier was a good indicator, too.

“What happened? Where’s Kurapika?”

“Kurapika is alright.” Efraim shut the door, locked and barred it. Then he admitted, “Given the circumstances.”

Needless to say, that did nothing to calm Leorio’s nerves. In fact, he felt them sizzling and buzzing with distress. “What circumstances?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Efraim assured and Killua snorted disdainfully. “But I would not disturb him right now.”

“But-”

“Sit down, Leorio. Although, on second thought, do wait until I bring you a towel. You know, before you ruin the couch.”

Leorio looked down at himself, painfully aware of how his clothes clung soggily to his skin and the unattractive mud smears all over his body, which had started to dry up and crack on his naked skin. Soon, he would get dirt all over the place. So much for looking nice for his special date. “Um, that would be smart. But can you at least tell Kurapika I’m here?”

As if he had been summoned, a door creaked and Kurapika stepped into the hallway.

He looked awful. So awful that Leorio felt his chest seize painfully because, god, he’d never seen Kurapika so washed-out. Dark circles had settled underneath his eyes, which for once had lost their mischievous spark, and his entire face looked gaunt, hollow. He looked like he hadn’t slept properly in  _ weeks _ , how the fuck was that possible? It hadn’t been two days since Kurapika had lain in his arms last, bright and healthy, overflowing with life. 

“I did what I could, but it’s not quite over yet,” Kurapika said to his father, unusually quiet, untypically small. “We have to bring him to mom first thing in the morning, I don’t think he can get through this on his own. He’s sleeping now, but I don’t want to leave him alone for too long.”

Kurapika’s glance strayed, then zoned in on Leorio. He froze. His mouth opened slowly, as if he meant to say something - but then Efraim squeezed his shoulder and regained Kurapika’s full attention.

“You take a break. Get a drink. I’ll keep an eye on Gon.”

“I’m fine,” was the snappish reply and he shook off his father’s hand.

“Please. I don’t want you to get sick, too.”

Kurapika’s lips grew thin with disdain. But he uttered no more protest, which was as good as an admission. Efraim walked past him and disappeared in his son’s room, leaving Kurapika and Leorio in an awkward stalemate, since it was too late for greetings and too dreary for mindless chatter.

“Gon’s sick?” Leorio asked quietly and peeked over to where Killua was sitting, still spreading gloom and no small amount of frustration. That would explain why the boy had come here instead of Gon staying at his place.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Kurapika replied, a little too gruffly for Leorio’s liking. He barely spared him a second glance when he headed for the kitchen cabinet to pick up some glasses. Leorio noticed something odd about the way he walked - he set down his feet gingerly, slowly, as if there was something wrong with his hip. 

“Yeah, I keep hearing that but too bad, I’m already worrying. I mean, have you looked in a mirror? You look like  _ shit _ and when I came here your dad greeted me with a warning shot, so I think I’m allowed to worry a little. More than a little. Are you even listening?”

“I am,” Kurapika replied curtly. “And at least I don’t look like I rolled in the mud like a-” He stopped himself when he realized what he was about to say. “Never mind. Killua, do you want some cider?”

Killua declined by making a dramatic gagging noise. 

Leorio fidgeted with the hem of his t-shirt, as if that could fix up his appearance. “Cut me some slack, I know I’m not looking exactly  _ presentable _ , but I ran into some trouble along the way and-”

The glass slipped from Kurapika’s grip and he gasped, tried to catch it, but it bounced off the counter and shattered loudly on the floor. Kurapika’s hands flew to his mouth, then he hid his face in them, breathing in, sighing deeply. Struggling for composure as if it cost the last of his effort not to fall down and shatter too.

“Pika,” Leorio called out softly. He tried for a cautious approach, tiptoeing closer to the mess of shards.

“I’m fine,” Kurapika hissed and toed some of the glass away. He slipped further out of reach.

“The hell you are. Look, if there’s anything I can do-”

“You can go change and let me clean this up in peace.”

“How about I do that  _ after _ I fix your exhaustion, hm? Before you kill someone with your grumpiness.”

Killua suddenly sat up straighter. “You could heal Gon,” he shouted across the room.

“No,” said Kurapika.

“Why not?”

“I took care of Gon. He’s stable.”

“For now,” Killua added.

Leorio cleared his throat. “So, does someone want to explain to me what the hell happened or are you just going to argue over my head all night?”

“Kurapika nearly got himself killed by a huckop,” Killua sneered. “And now Gon’s the one who has to pay for it.”

Leorio looked to Kurapika, who turned his back on him and picked up a bottle of cider from the counter. He uncorked it. Then, quietly, he said: “It’s true. I’m sure Killua here is burning to tell you all of the embarrassing details and he will, once he gets you something clean and dry to change into. You should find something among Gon’s stuff that will fit.”

Killua rose and beckoned Leorio to follow him and added, ever so helpfully: “You better take a shower, you stink like fish and huckops. You didn’t run into that wench again, did you?”

Leorio hovered, still not quite willing to go although Kurapika made it quite clear that he didn’t want any help.  _ Yet _ , Leorio thought. He jogged after Killua, and said: “She saved me from drowning.”

“Ah. Happens to the best of us.” Killua demonstratively opened the bathroom door for Leorio before he climbed a steep ladder at the end of the hallway, which led up to the attic. Leorio knew from what Kurapika had told him that the attic was more of a storage room, so Gon slept up there in a nest of blankets, between walls of books and terrible flea market art. He kept all of his clothes in a large wooden chest like a pirate - they would have given him decent furniture, but Gon didn’t care much about having a room for himself. He slept and dressed in it and that was it - most of his time was spent outside, where there was more to see, more to  _ smell _ .

Leorio slipped into the bathroom and pulled the shirt over his head; he poured some hot water in the sink to soak his clothes in. By the time Killua showed up with something to change into, he had angrily rubbed soap into his entire shirt, waging an intense battle against the mud.

“There’s this fancy thing called a washing machine, you know,” Killua said as he dumped the stack of clothes right at Leorio’s feet.

“There’s a thing called stain treatment, too,” Leorio replied without looking up from his work. “If I put that in the washing machine all crusty and gross, I’m just going to spread the dirt all over everything else.” He paused. Cleared his throat, then asked in the most demonstratively casual manner: “So, now that it’s just us, how bad is Gon really doing?”

He could feel Killua’s presence just hovering behind him, a force of barely contained unrest who, unlike the Kurtas, would not dream of playing the situation down for Leorio’s sake. He may not ever have been kind to Leorio, but he had been honest.

“He’s been bitten by a huckop, multiple times. And he has bitten the thing, too. Kurapika has tried to purge the venom out of him, but it seems like he didn’t get all of it.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, you can say that.”

Goosebumps spread on Leorio’s skin, as he started to feel rather chilly, standing there exposed. He would not have minded slipping into something nice and dry that very moment, if he hadn’t felt all grimy too. So instead, he dropped the lump of his shirt back in the sink where it landed with a wet noise and rubbed his hands dry. “I’m not going to lie to you, I have no idea if my powers are going to be any help with poisoning. I haven’t tried it yet. But I’ll give it a shot. Still, I wanna know what happened. You said it was only one huckop. I find it hard to believe it managed to fool Kurapika.”

“I don’t.” 

Leorio shot him a look through the mirror and Killua shrugged. “What? He’s half human, half plant. Sure, he’s got magic, but no instincts to speak of. If Gon hadn’t decided to go back home, he would have been toast.”

“Why  _ did _ Gon turn back in the first place? Hadn’t you guys planned a fun game night or something?”

“We saw the huckops that were crawling all over town. Well, I did. I was flying over the houses to pass the time when I noticed them, so I met Gon half-way, to warn him. He wanted to go back to the farm immediately. We stuck to the side of the street, because there weren’t lots of nooks where they could hide, so at least we would be able to see them coming, but it also meant that Gon stayed human the whole time. A wolf would have attracted too much attention. So we took a bit longer turning back than we would’ve liked, but we thought we were good when we arrived and saw Kurapika standing on the porch, talking to you.”

Leorio frowned and had already opened his mouth to proclaim that no, this wasn’t how he remembered things at all, when Killua added: “Except it wasn’t  _ you _ .”

“No.”

“Gon started to charge at you right away, turning as he ran, and I didn’t quite realize why until  _ that thing _ started changing and digging its claws into Kurapika right before our eyes. Gon tore it off Kurapika before it could do any real damage, but-” The flow of Killua’s hands and words became erratic, his face twitched into facets of emotion, never quite settling on one. “Then he was just wrestling with the thing and they were digging their teeth and claws into one another and- it was such a mess, Kurapika was screaming, Gon was screaming and then he tore its throat open and that was the end of it. Except it was still wearing your fucking face and Gon was starting to shake from the venom, and, and- then Kurapika pulled him into his room to start the purging and I haven’t seen him since then.”

Killua scowled and crossed his arms; his nails dug deep into his skin and he worried his chapped lips. “He must have smelled that it wasn’t you. That’s why he knew right away that something was wrong. But he didn’t tell me.”

“You’re not blaming yourself for not intervening, are you?”

“Of course not! That would be just stupid.” Killua scoffed, but his words quivered with the shrill discord of denial. 

“Well, I’m just glad no one else got severely hurt, thanks to Gon’s quick thinking. Now we can focus all of our efforts on helping him get better. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Killua drew up his shoulders as if he meant to shrug, but couldn't quite commit to it. “I  _ guess _ .”

Leorio wanted to say ‘see?’ but he could tell that nothing he could say would help the boy feel better. He knew that look on Killua’s face; he had seen it before on Pietro’s parents. That volatile mixture of frustration and helplessness, the desire to do something - to be useful and contribute to Gon’s recovery - and at the same time grappling with the fact that the situation might be completely out of his hands.

“You’re going to keep an eye on Kurapika for me, aren’t you?”

“I doubt that he’s going anywhere.” 

“Well, no, that’s not what I meant, just- never mind, just don’t leave him alone, okay? And don’t do something stupid like picking a fight, because now would really be a bad time.”

Killua made a noncommittal noise as he turned and walked out of the bathroom, letting the the door fall shut behind him. Leorio really hoped that his words had reached the soft core that he knew was buried somewhere underneath Killua’s usual cocky, troublemaking attitude. He wondered, perhaps, if Kurapika and Killua could provide some comfort for one another, if only they got along better.

Leorio showered hastily, rushed by the irrational fear that the night had more horrors to release upon them; it weighed on his shoulders like a yoke. He did not even wait for the cold water to turn hot and soothe his sore muscles.

He shivered, scrubbed, and forced his damp limbs into new clothes, then threw a towel around his neck and hurried back into the living room. Killua and Kurapika sat on opposite ends of the couch, sharing silence and an unnecessary distance.

Leorio plopped down right between them, careful not to knock over the two glasses of cider on the coffee table. He pretended not to notice the way Kurapika flinched or the flicker of panic in his eyes and forced himself to move slower. To make sure Kurapika saw the arm that reached out for him before it settled around his shoulders and pulled him close. He was a dead weight against Leorio’s side, rigid and unyielding.

“Sooooo,” Leorio said, and picked up his glass of murky apple wine. “Crazy day, huh.”

He was met with silence. So, he talked for the three of them. About his work, mostly, stupid gossip that circulated among the other nurses and fun pregnancy anecdotes that made Killua squirm with discomfort until Kurapika snuffled laughter and relaxed.

Killua insisted that they talk about ‘literally anything that isn't disgusting as fuck, what is wrong with you, you old creep’ and they started a heated debate about whether or not Bravely Default was a better game than Final Fantasy: Four Heroes of Light. 

The night grew old and quiet around them.

Kurapika’s breathing slowed down and his head started to sink to his chest. He jerked up again and blinked eagerly, forcing himself to stay awake. Then drifted off again and the cycle repeated for a few minutes until he was finally and mercifully asleep. Leorio raised his hand, pressed his knuckles to Kurapika’s pale cheek and tried to picture the pull of exhaustion that must have been working on his boyfriend. Soon he could feel it,  _ actually _ feel it - his eyes were taken by a dull, burning sensation, his limbs grew heavy and his jaw popped as Leorio yawned.

“How does it work?” Killua asked, straightening his back, craning his head quite curiously.

“How does what work?” Leorio replied, massaging the spot underneath his ear.

“Your healing powers.”

“Oh. Sympathy, I guess. I mean, sometimes I pick up scratches and that, without noticing or trying, but these days I heal so fast I can never tell if I just cured someone’s old papercut or if I got it myself and it immediately got all scabby. Not that it matters.”

“I guess it matters to the guys who wonder where their scab went.”

“Pshaw,” Leorio said and waved his hand in front of his face, indicating that this was the other person’s problem, which was to say, he didn’t consider it a problem at all. Scabs were a nuisance made for picking at. Nothing to get sentimental about. Most people would probably not even notice they were gone.

Beside him, Killua yawned like a cat.

“You should try to get some sleep, too.”

“I’m not sleeping until Gon is feeling better.”

“And I get why you would want to do that. I really do. But you’re not going to be him any help like that. Worst case scenario, you’re making him worry about you when he should focus on getting better. Like, I know this sounds probably, uh, what’s the word? Like I’m just making empty phrases or like I’m preaching, but I’ve worked as a nurse for years now and trust me, you can’t look after others if you’re not looking after yourself.” 

What Leorio did not mention was how hard it had been to accept that fact himself. How sometimes tending to the needs of others was so much easier than having to sit down and think about, or even admit to, one’s own needs. And although nothing about Killua’s behaviour so far suggested that he had any trouble putting himself first, who was to say if his cocky and abrasive nature wasn’t just something he hid behind?

Killua blew a raspberry. “I’m not tired though. I can go all night.”

“Even if that’s true, you shouldn’t say it like that,” Leorio replied, cringing. 

“I didn’t say it like anything, you’re just a big old pervert.”

“Excuse me?”

Killua was saved from a noogie by the sound of a door opening, followed by the return of Efraim. He brought a whiff of a strange smell, like rotting leaves and old flowers and he held his hands up to his chest.

Leorio could see Killua’s shoulders wiring up with tension, as he braced himself.

Efraim did not explain himself right away, instead he looked at his sleeping son, a little forlorn, rubbing his wrist as he tried and failed to make a decision.

“He got worse again, didn’t he?” pressed Killua and with this, he broke the stupor.

Efraim’s shoulder’s slumped even more. He lowered his hand on his son’s crown and said, very quietly, the absolute worst thing:

“I don’t know what to do.”

Leorio felt the impact of the words like a fist to his guts. “Is there any way we can help?”

He shook his head. “The venom has started to spread again. It needs to be purged a second time, but Kurapika already poured a lot into healing Gon, and he had no time to recover-”

“Why don’t you just draw energy from his plants?” Killua hissed, impatiently.

Efraim looked at him, crestfallen, and Killua’s expression froze. “No.”

“There’s not much any of us can do here, at this point. We need to bring him to Sylvia, now, but he’s in no position to walk-”

“Then I’ll carry him,” Leorio interrupted. “As the boar. I’ll bring him right into the sanctuary.”

“He has been throwing up black bile the last few minutes, I don’t think he’s strong enough to hold onto you.”

“Then we’ll strap him onto my back. Do you have any climbing gear that we can use?”

“No, but I have a tow rope. That’s the closest thing I can offer. Tying him up will cost time though, time that we don’t have. And frankly, I’m not an expert in these things, but there’s a good chance we’ll hurt him and in his condition-” He broke off and ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I think you should see him. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

* * *

Leorio saw, but did not understand.

He had been in Kurapika’s room three times now, and twice he’d had the honor of sleeping in Kurapika’s bed, a privilege that was reserved for those in great need, as it seemed. What he  _ expected _ to find then was the stark contrast of a pristine room to Gon’s condition, an island of sickness among flourishing greens. (And he tried not to think of the bodies they found in the woods, that poor couple, necrosis eating at their wounds although he knew that the same thing was killing Gon now.)

It was as if the sickness had spread throughout the room and corrupted it, killing the plants that Kurapika had so meticulously tended to. His vanilla - his beloved orchid was no more. The bulbous stalks that spread all over the ceiling and the walls had shriveled up and grown pale; yellow leaves lay scattered upon the floor. Long shadows crept from them, for the only light in the room came from Kurapika’s library style desk lamp.

And Gon? In his stead, on the bed, lay what looked like a giant piece of puff pastry. It smelled like old blood and wet leaves, and within its brittle layers, something was moving. Writhing. Leorio felt bile rise in his throat as he thought of a maggot in a cocoon.

“What the shit.”

Next to him, Killua inhaled noisily and turned to Efraim. “Do you have more plants in this house that Kurapika could draw from?”

“The herbs in the kitchen. But that’s all. That’s  _ nothing _ .”

Leorio approached the bed, step by hesitant step, until he reached the height of the pillow where the cocoon grew thinner. He could see stubborn dark hair fall around a face contorted with pain. Teeth bared, black spit seeping from the corner of Gon’s mouth. A spiderweb of septic black veins crept from a wound where the shoulder met the neck. He trembled and his eyes were closed, but when he opened his mouth he called for Killua.

Killua rushed in and Leorio stepped aside to make room for him. Killua cowered in front of Gon’s face, all of his composure and bravado gone. He tore some of the cocoon away, as easy as breaking up a wasps nest, for it was just as light and papery. He got ahold of Gon’s hand and squeezed it tightly with both of his, letting him know that he was there, even if the words failed to leave his lips.

Gon cracked his eyes open. They were bloodshot.

Leorio looked helplessly back to Efraim, who still lingered in the doorway.

“Does he need that cocoon to… to get better?” he asked carefully. He didn’t quite understand what this thing was, but he knew that it wasn’t caused by the huckop, so it must have been Kurapika’s doing.

“Kurapika made it to slow down Gon’s metabolism, especially his heart rate, to keep the venom from spreading too quickly, but it has started to wilt. I guess it served its purpose anyway.” Efraim put a hand on his lower stomach, rubbing over it absently.

“And the plants - that was Kurapika too?” Leorio was mostly guessing, trying to fit the things he had overheard into a greater picture. 

“He took their life energy and poured it into Gon. I know he gave some of his own, too.” Efraim lowered his voice almost to a whisper and Leorio scuttled closer to him again, tilting his head. “I don’t think he can do it a second time. Which is why we need to bring Gon to Sylvia as quick as possible - she can draw life from the entire forest, she could purge the venom in a blink and it would barely hurt a tree, but-”

“But you got plenty of trees?” Leorio interrupted. “Your whole land is covered in trees, you just need to step out of the door. Kurapika could use those, right?”

“No,” Gon rasped and Leorio flinched. “Don’t put yourself in danger because of me. The huckops...”

“Won’t be an issue anymore,” Leorio promised. “At least not tonight. I don’t wanna brag, but we killed, like, a lot of them. And they no longer have the element of surprise.”

“Maybe,” Efraim wagered. “Maybe not. Gon is right, we cannot risk anyone else getting bitten. Besides, I don’t want Kurapika to perform his magic right in the open. People might see.”

“Like who?”

“People driving by, bored teenagers coming home from the club, the police asking about why a shot has been fired here tonight…”

“Guys,” Killua interrupted. “I know where we need to go.”


End file.
